Nobody is breath-taken with surprise now when governance issues are (routinely and perennially) on the agenda for the board, and neither they should be. With all the governance debate for the last two or three decades, leaders have no excuse on this – it’s a thing to have good governance, no doubt about it. And…
Tag: accountability

Corona coffee: and it’s a . . . book!
As we reach a year since the first rumblings of COVID-19, we are more than a little chuffed to see the release of the book written by our Managing Director, Carolyn Evans. Published by Brill | Nijhoff, based in the Netherlands, the book becomes Volume 61 in their series ‘Legal Aspects of International Organizations‘. The…

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 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…