Governance Scenario
Standard 5.2 · Sharing Insights and Promoting Understanding
The Gap Between Knowing
By Synnovate · Published 2026 · Governance Scenario
The Situation
The head had been in post for four years. She knew the school intimately - its history, its culture, its informal dynamics, the things that had been tried and failed and why. She communicated well with the board. Her reports were thorough. Her relationship with the chair was good.
At a board development session facilitated by an external consultant, trustees were asked to write down the three things they most needed to understand better about the school. Then the head was asked the same question about the board.
The lists had almost no overlap. The head's sense of what the board knew was significantly more optimistic than the board's own account. The board's sense of what it knew about the school was significantly less complete than the head believed it to be.
Provocations
- "A head and board that assume shared understanding without testing it are both governing from a fiction."
- "Thorough reporting is not the same as shared knowledge. Information transferred is not information understood."
- "The gaps in what a board knows are not always in the areas where it asks questions."
- "The moment a consultant's exercise reveals what four years of meetings did not is the moment to ask what the meetings were for."
Considerations
Shared understanding between a board and its head is a prerequisite for effective governance - and it is significantly harder to achieve than it appears. The head has deep, contextual, evolving knowledge of the institution. The board has structured, periodic, reported knowledge. These are different kinds of knowing, and they do not naturally converge.
Heads often overestimate how much the board understands about the school, because they experience the process of sharing information and interpret it as the transfer of understanding. Boards often underestimate the gaps in their knowledge because they do not know what they do not know.
The implications are practical. If the head believes the board understands the cultural dynamics of a particular department, she may not explain the context for a decision that depends on that understanding. If the board thinks it understands the competitive landscape, it may ask questions based on assumptions that are outdated.
Governance induction addresses the knowledge gap at the moment of joining. What is less commonly structured is the ongoing process of deepening trustee understanding across the term of their service. The board that knows the most about the school it governs is generally also the most effective.
Platforms like Loom support this by making institutional context accessible to trustees between meetings - policy history, decision records, strategic context - so the board's knowledge deepens continuously rather than depending on what makes it into each meeting's papers.