Parking Lot Maintenance
A Fun, Future-Based Task for Year-End
Creative thinking is beneficial, yet not every new idea should steer a meeting in a different direction. Many boards employ the “parking lot” concept: they move ideas unrelated to the current discussion to a list for later review. Unfortunately, good ideas often die in the parking lot because, once parked, they’re rarely seen again.
However, good practices to maintain and review the parking lot will benefit the board in several ways:
Director morale and innovation: Valuing creative ideas, even if not immediately adopting them, encourages directors to engage in wide-ranging discussion and generate new concepts.
Potential value for the organization: The spark of a game-changing idea can arise during an unrelated conversation. A good parking process ensures that you won’t lose them.
Balance different ways of thinking and contributing: Some directors can quickly conceive and articulate new ideas amid a fast-paced discussion, while others are not so adept at explaining a concept as it pops into their minds. Good parking lot maintenance allows ideas from both types of thinkers to be considered by the board.
Steps to Good Parking
Define the parking lot: It typically stores promising, but currently inapplicable concepts. It is not a list of every item that the board does not have time for. Anything that should be addressed in the next year should go on the quarterly planning list for the board or a relevant committee. If it is an idea that dies quickly with no one supporting it, it is likely not worth parking.
Collection: Someone in each meeting should collect any ideas the chair directs to the parking lot. Use a standard format: brief title, proposer(s), context, and optional short description. More than that defeats the purpose. There should be just enough information to capture the concept for future review. After the meeting, circulate descriptions of any new parking lot items so the proposing director(s) can clarify as needed.
Annual Review: The board may retrieve ideas from the parking lot for development any time, but it should assign a few directors to review the full list at least once per year. This team primarily engages in “what if...” thinking and generates recommendations. It might do some minimal research, but its task does not include developing the ideas.
Review Process: The Valets Go to Work
The annual review team should enter this process with a clear understanding of the organization’s strategic goals, plans, and opportunities, and be well aware of what is going on the sector overall. Most directors enjoy the wide open thinking aspect of this task, so boards will often select different people each year.
The team should look at each item in the parking lot and consider how it might help the organization fulfill its mission. This team does not dismiss items for lack of resources. If an item is activated, part of the investigative process will be to determine whether project funding or other resources can be secured. However, the team should also be realistic in how many items it recommends that the board activate at once. After some wide-ranging discussion on every parked idea, the team should mark it with one of the following categories:
Activate: A director or committee should investigate and expand on the concept, and prepare a brief report and recommendation for the board, or it should be included as a specific idea to consider in the next strategic planning session.
Hold: Concepts that have potential in the next three years, based on long-term strategic goals, trends in the sector or anticipated changes in the community. Date them, and if they remain on the list for three years without activation, the board should determine if they remain on hold or get moved to the dormant list.
Dormant: Concepts that are unlikely to be activated within at least three years.
After reviewing all parked items, the team should provide a report to the board with its recommendations for the full list. While it has not developed the concepts, the team may include the ideas it generated for all those marked “activate”.
The board’s ultimate decision about what to move forward on will still depend on its available time and other resources. This exercise may end up with some items the team recommends to activate being sent back to the parking lot for another year, however this is not a waste. This creative exercise helps the board look at possibilities without immediately shooting something down due to lack of resources. It keeps directors innovative and looking outside the usual options, which can only benefit the organization.
Non-profit directors particularly benefit from this process because they usually have less interaction between meetings than other teams. Workplace colleagues have more informal interaction to flesh out ideas and bounce them off each other, and their viable concepts eventually make their way on to a meeting agenda. With a board, particularly one with few financial resources, this needs to be a deliberate process.
The key to a successful parking process is keeping it under control. If it becomes onerous, it no longer serves its purpose and becomes another task the board does not have time for.
Are you planning to make 2025 the year that your non-profit board really tackles governance issues? I offer single sessions, or multi-session packages, of coaching and advisory time. Contact me for more information: