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Board Governance Cycle

Run the Board Governance Cycle MicroSim fullscreen

About This MicroSim

There are two things in this diagram and the objective is to stop confusing them.

The cycle on the left is routine. A seat is filled, duties are assigned, the board meets on its cadence, and eventually a term limit is reached and the seat rotates off -- back to the top, for that seat only. The word staggered matters: seats vacate on their own schedules, never all at once, so a board never loses all its experience in one year.

The trigger on the right is not part of that cycle at all. A founder or lead mentor departing is an event, not a stage, and it fires the written succession plan regardless of where any seat happens to be in its term.

Clubs conflate these, and the cost is specific: they treat succession planning as something the board will get to during a normal meeting, which means it does not exist on the day it is needed. A plan improvised under pressure is the failure mode the right-hand branch exists to prevent.

How to Use

  • Hover a step to preview it; click to pin the definition.
  • Follow the loop from Meet on a Fixed Cadence through the term check and back -- that is the routine cycle.
  • The red nodes are the separate departure trigger; nothing in the cycle leads into them.

Lesson Plan

Bloom level: Analyze (L4) -- differentiate

Learning objective: Given a board's current state, the learner differentiates the routine seat-rotation cycle from the one-time succession-plan trigger that a founder's departure activates.

Before the sim (5 min). Ask who runs the club if the founder is unavailable next Saturday. Then ask if that answer is written down anywhere.

With the sim (10 min). Walk the cycle first, then the trigger. Ask what connects them -- the answer is nothing, and that is the point. The trigger fires on its own timing.

After the sim (15 min). Draft the succession plan's three concrete parts: who acts as lead, which signing authorities transfer, and where the document lives.

Check for understanding. Ask: "A treasurer's term expires the same month the founder steps down. Which path handles which?" Two separate paths running at once, and being able to keep them apart is the objective met.

Embedding This MicroSim

Paste this into any page of the book, adjusting the relative path to docs/sims/ for the page's depth:

<iframe src="../../sims/board-governance-cycle/main.html" width="100%" height="822" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Specification

The full specification below is extracted from Chapter 34: Establishing an Oversight Board and Inventory System.

Type: workflow
**sim-id:** board-governance-cycle<br/>
**Library:** Mermaid<br/>
**Status:** Specified

Purpose: Trace how recruitment, roles, meeting cadence, and term limits run as one continuous cycle for a board seat, and show succession planning as the separate event that fires the moment a founder or lead mentor actually departs.

Bloom Taxonomy: Analyze (L4)
Bloom Taxonomy Verb: differentiate

Learning objective: Given a board's current state, the learner differentiates the routine seat-rotation cycle from the one-time succession-plan trigger that a founder's departure activates.

Steps (flowchart with a decision diamond and a separate trigger branch):
1. Start: "Board Seat Vacant" -- click reveals "A seat with no current holder, either because the club is forming its first board or a term has just expired."
2. Process: "Recruit for the Seat" -- click reveals the Board Member Recruitment definition above.
3. Process: "Assign Roles and Duties" -- click reveals the Board Roles And Duties definition above.
4. Process: "Meet on a Fixed Cadence" -- click reveals the Board Meeting Cadence definition above.
5. Decision: "Term Limit Reached?" -- click reveals the Board Term Limits definition above; "No" loops back to step 4.
6. Process (from "Yes"): "Seat Rotates Off (Staggered)" -- click reveals "The seat vacates on its own staggered schedule, never at the same time as every other seat."; loops back to step 1 for that one seat.
7. Separate trigger, drawn off to the side and connected by a dashed line rather than the main cycle: "Founder or Lead Mentor Departs" -- click reveals "An unplanned or planned departure, the event succession planning exists to prepare for."
8. Process (from trigger): "Execute Written Succession Plan" -- click reveals the Succession Planning definition above.
9. End (from step 8): "Acting Lead Named, Signing Authority Transfers" -- click reveals "The board's prepared answer takes effect immediately, rather than being improvised under pressure."

Interactivity requirement (satisfied): every node has a Mermaid `click` directive tied to an infobox showing its revealed text, matching the definitions already given in this chapter's prose.

Color coding: Blue for the recruitment-and-assignment steps, gold for the recurring meeting-and-term-limit cycle, the dashed trigger branch and its two downstream nodes in red to visually separate a rare, high-stakes event from routine governance.

Implementation: Mermaid flowchart (`graph TD`) rendered in main.html with `click NodeId call showInfo("NodeId")` directives for every node, opening a side-panel infobox; a "Reset View" button re-centers the diagram after any zoom or pan; layout reflows responsively on narrow screens.

References