Click to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox.

Annual General Meetings present an opportunity for those running an organisation to meet their owners or shareholders and give an account of their stewardship. If reports presented to the shareholders are clear and transparent and if, in turn, the shareholders treat their directors as responsible people, the event should be a sensible but rigorous examination of the health of the organisation.

Judged by those criteria the AGM I attended last evening depicted an organisation in the terminal stages of incompetence. The Chairman allowed the noise level to reach such a pitch that only those with pristine hearing could understand what was being said. A Resolution of predictably an extremely controversial nature that had been presented to the members turned out to be ultra vires and had to be embarrassingly withdrawn by the proposers, one of whom had pretentions to the Chair.

Procedural matters and points of order dominated the meeting so completely that virtually no business was transacted at all. Presentations apparently intended to enlighten the members were poorly made, with illegible tables of figures and dimly lit pictures, and so peppered with caveats of the “nothing has been decided” sort, that the exercise would have been more fruitful if conducted as a brainstorming session.

A group of directors at odds with each other will never communicate well with their shareholders. It is in the nature of our aspirations to democracy that we will have committees and boards. They have a place in an organisation but when they come to dominate it the consequence is virtual insurrection. For some reason they reduce personal responsibility and introduce the game of pass the buck.

Committees design camels, not racehorses.

But society is built on compromise. The give and take exhibited in a good marriage is mirrored in well-run organisations where disputes remain objective and the simple but effective Top in the Boardroom technique of fitting personal objectives to corporate needs solves problems before they happen.

What can be learnt from the several thousands of pounds of paper consumed and the hours of seemingly pointless dissention at the AGM I attended?

You can be as meticulous a communicator as you like but if you cannot handle the person or people with whom you are communicating it counts for nothing. As with all leadership, some will carry the torch, others the fire-extinguisher. Both must know what the other is doing; both must work in harmony. If they do not one will surely set fire to the other and the other will smother the one with foam.

At least, that’s what happened last night.