In any governance project, a procedural point on which we inevitably face many questions is how to duly record what is decided by a board of directors (or any board of governance, however it might be named in other organisational structures). What is needed to show good governance? Don’t we need to do a ‘Hansard-style’…
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.
Simplicity v Complexity
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….
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…
Sabbatical postcard – lies, damned lies and statistics v2.0
What the numbers really say is an issue at least as old as published statistics themselves, but one finding a renaissance in the world of the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016: ‘post-truth’.* Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a commercial organisation knows, for example, that it is possible to have both…
Sabbatical postcard – kawhe i runga i te ara i roto i Aotearoa
Kawhe i runga i te ara i roto i Aotearoa – or coffee on the way in New Zealand – prompts fresh reflection on the microeconomic importance of engaging with fellow human beings, and the “innovation” value of just getting the basics right. In Wellington to present an element of my PhD research (to…
Coffee makes planning go ’round
Carolyn Evans and Tanya van der Wall share our guide to keeping planning in perspective as a means to an end – all the coffee in the world won’t fix a governance and planning process that doesn’t keep “eyes on the prize” of realising the organisation’s purpose. Three decades since Michael Porter identified the ‘lost…
Sabbatical postcard: coffee on the road, for one
When it comes to decision making and governance, there is probably no bigger stage than that of the United Nations. There are many other organisations that may well have more, or more obvious, influence – like multinational corporations that design our lives with their products and redesign our planet with the impact of their production…
Sabbatical postcard: a dash of dissent in your coffee on the road
For those of us fascinated by leadership and decision making, Australia’s first time in three decades as UN Security Council President has been, to say the least, underwhelming. Any whelm was certainly hard to find in the one topic put forward for formal debate by Australia in the Presidential role – small arms. Not unimportant…
Can’t see the wood for the trees?
Internal projects naturally drive additional business activity and costs but our experience at ThinkEvans indicates they do not always result in an appropriate return on investment. So what is going wrong? Here we look at some of the classic issues we see in businesses and suggest a few actions to start successfully delivering the projects…
Coffee on the road … in cyberspace!
Since being interviewed in 2009 about how we help our clients but are never “stuck behind a desk“, we have continued to walk the talk of virtual workspaces – it is really just the most practical solution for many of us in contemporary organisations.* Since we are not at all shy about our adventures in…
Is your organisation organised?
Before making organisational design decisions that will be productive and sustainable, enabling sound planning for the future, the organisation needs to be able to articulate its current state clearly. Already cringing? This is more than just consultant-speak or HR waffling: it is as simple as knowing where you are so you can work out…
Channel 9 Melbourne: ‘Cash lure’ for older workers
This report was the lead item on the Channel 9 6pm news bulletin in Melbourne on Wednesday 18 April 2012. The article drew on ThinkEvans research into the changing nature of working life, including the dramatic rise over the last decade in workforce participation by women 55-64 years. The ThinkEvans analysis looked at data from…
Good news, bad news … & 6 o’clock news
ThinkEvans’ research on the changing nature of working lives has had spawned discussion right around Australia this week – after an article on page 4 of the Sydney Morning Herald* on Tuesday, 10 April, quoting our research. (Read more about the research) Radio stations in Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Sydney and Perth interviewed Managing Director Carolyn…
Women vote with their feet to top up their super
Women in the “transition to retirement years” are voting with their feet to top up their super. In the course of conducting research for our “Fair Enough?” report submitted recently to the Australian Business Foundation, we also found that women in Australia are rethinking their super – with many finding that their situation is likely…