We’ve often had the conversation about achieving a balance between simplicity and complexity in organisational design, which – not unexpectedly – has knock on effects in how governance of that organisation will then perform. Of course, there is great strength in a self-explanatory design – like having a big red button to hit in emergencies….
Category: Thinking
Being a boutique management consultancy, a majority of our work and client reports remain confidential to that client, and we can only provide an indication via the material under the Client Activities heading.
Posts here highlight a cross section of our material that is in the public domain to provide a taste test of our work and related goings on – news articles, shorter comments and longer think pieces, web sites in which we are involved, reports in the public domain, and so on.
The gentle (?!) art of crafting reports
As much as we have come to shudder at the idea that there can be due accountability without formal reporting, the prospect of a truck pulling up to the door to deliver voluminous materials for a board meeting is something that, equally, we greet with regretful sighs. All too often we have seen baroque board…
The perils of trust without accountability
An earlier post on accountability concluded that ‘a pervasive reason why a decision-maker ought to explain and justify conduct is to engender the trust necessary to function effectively in the circumstances. Knowing why makes it possible to look at to whom one should be accountable, and for what conduct.’ That post was prompted by many experiences showing that the…
Thinking about ‘being accountable’
In the very broad church of governance and decision-making, ‘being accountable’ has long since become one of those expressions that is bandied about as the all-encompassing remedy for poor decisions, inappropriate actions, lacklustre results – not least, accountability is cast as a panacea to corporate performance ills and the solution to ‘undemocratic’ government. [1] But…
Governance is … what now?
In the FAQs grab bag for consultants and other advisers to organisations, the predictable inclusions are a bunch of things about ‘governance’ – what they think it is, what a good system looks like, why senior people should lose sleep over it, and the like. Unfortunately, all of the talk that goes into the top…
Thinking about being ‘a little bit unique’
Not that we’re a bunch of grammar fanatics, but when we routinely get people quoting our reports for years afterwards (no, really – years and years!) it does rather focus the mind on trying to get the spelling and punctuation correct! So forgive us a little in-joke when we say how often we smile when…
Thinking about one of the ‘golden rules’ of governance
It’s a long way from done but it’s already been an interesting year – by which we mean “interesting” in the sense of the curse “may you live in interesting times”! Frankly, for our taste the last 12 or 18 months has been just a little bit too interesting! Looking back a bit further, though,…
Down the microscope, briefly
In every organisation, there is a group to whom the organisation owes its existence. We often talk of the ‘owners’, since in a commercial organisation it is the owners, literally, who cause the enterprise to come into being and to have a particular purpose. But there is an equivalent group for every enterprise, commercial or…
Dissent v Consensus
Setting up for success really does start in the board room. Otherwise, chances are the entity will flounder at least, and founder at worst. More than that, a great board needs to be a great team. Achieving that is no mean feat and often calls for disagreement on complex issues – although, we hasten to…
Endless coffee is great – but endless time on planning, not so much
Balancing time allocated to board tasks is yet another challenge for the board that requires compromise – between enough attention to rightful detail, and tipping over into meddling in management, for example; or between devoting enough time to well-informed planning, and investing so much time that plans far outweigh results. For the board, governance and…
Getting to more than the sum of the parts
There are many organisations that have no legal obligation to follow this or that regime for corporate governance. But our question remains, why do it the hard way? Instead – after decades of high-profile corporate disasters – why not learn a lesson from the experience of others: it seems far better to choose proactively to report along…
Rectangles are not squares, and not all roles in decision making are decision making roles
The trick maths question back around mid-primary school is about squares and rectangles – both are defined by having four sides, two sets of parallel sides, and four corners of 90º. But squares have one more feature, crucial to the definition – all sides are the same length. So all squares are rectangles but not…
Clarifying consensus
Possibly the most frequent question put to us is “if we don’t have consent amongst the board, how can we move forward?” For the largest part, this speaks to a very common misunderstanding that we strike in our work – about the meaning of consensus in a decision making process. Part of the difficulty is…
Sabbatical postcard – board decisions, how hard can they be anyhow?
Today brings another round of ‘journalism’ telling us that we live in a time of more information than ever before, and yet more social media messages urging us to think there is no mystery that can’t be solved if we google it hard enough or crowd-source the problem to enough people in enough places. That’s…