When I reflect on my experience in and around governing boards, both as a member of and a consultant to them, I’d have to say that transactional conversations are the order of the day. In other words, the domain of action is pretty much confined to the domain of the known. But boards must provide direction for the future because how else are they to judge the appropriateness of management’s decisions in the present? In doing so, however, they cross the border between the known and the unknown and move from the domain of relative certainty into that of uncertainty. And it is here that the mode of conversation has to change from the relative tidiness of the transactional to the messiness of the transformational; from the exchange of information to, in Berthoff’s terms, the creation of meaning.