Client:Chief Executive Officer, ACPSEM As the world finds into a new gear that is not (at least not entirely) all-about-COVID-all-of-the-time, staff changes are an important opportunity to take that deep breath and think about some of the gaps that may have emerged in the rough and tumble of just surviving COVID-19. Lending a hand with…
Tag: decision making
Mind the gap: questions (still) wanting answers
When it comes to knowing what we need to know to make a decision, it is always tempting to think we can devise a better answer if we first ask more questions. And, no doubt at all, we would be the last ones to say “less questions” – in fact, as committed members of the…
Basics – the gift that keeps on giving
Client: Hadrian Logistics Solutions Pty Ltd Our confidential logistics project -involving a significant series of detailed functional reviews and the associated labour standards – has motored on to a new series of activities in the first half of 2022. Even as the world is trying to “learn to live with COVID”, keeping a keen eye…
Governance: report delivered
Client: Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart The report from this project provides an extensive context for the goverance issues presently faced by the Congregation and its leaders, and then puts forward a substantive body of findings and recommendations for actions needed to revitalise the Congregation’s leadership functions in contemplation…
Governance: report on time for reflection
Client: Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart Over the cusp of the time in office of two leadership teams, this project consulted with, and then synthesized findings from, successive leadership teams at the helm of the Congregation. The time was right for reflecting on the changing needs of the Congregation,…
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…
All recommendations adopted
Client:Chief Executive Officer, ACPSEM ThinkEvans has now reported to the ACPSEM Board of Directors on a range of governance initiatives that, if implemented, will steer the organisation towards positive governance outcomes for the entire ACPSEM membership. The report put forward 32 headline recommendations for change, all of which were adopted by the ACPSEM Board. The…
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,…
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 consensus 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…
Coffee on the road – our word for the year
Big surprise – no, really, an actual surprise – our word for 2017 is not ‘coffee’! This year we are going public with our choice to applaud all those mature decision makers who know when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, and when to walk off into the sunset for the next challenge –…
Project wrap up
Client: Board of Directors, Coast City Country General Practice Training Ltd In wrapping up this project the ThinkEvans team put focus on the purposes of the organisation (what are we here to do?) and aligning activities accordingly (how are we going to do it?), to make a strong foundation from which to measure outcomes (how well…
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…
Post-merger integration for the Board
Client: Board of Directors, Grand Pacific Health Ltd As part of further implementing the merger of two previous Divisions of General Practice, review current Board and committee charters and related documents, and propose a body of governance documents for Board activities. A Board policy manual was approved by the Board 30 May 2013 and an…
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…
Coffee on the geopolitical road
After three decades more or less confined to the peanut gallery of the United Nations, the indications now are that Prime Minister Julia Gillard will support a bid by Australia to become an elected member of the United Nations Security Council (for which former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is widely acknowledged as having had considerable…
Assessing professional development needs
Client: Illawarra-Shoalhaven Medicare Local As part of a collaboration with CCCGPTraining, ThinkEvans has launched a survey of primary health care providers in the Illawarra-Shoalhaven area, to gather evidence for assessing professional development needs of those working in primary health care.
Productivity and Fair Work final report released
Client: the Australian Business Foundation The NSW Business Chamber has published online the final report of the project Productivity and Fair Work, an independent project led by the Australian Business Foundation Engaged by the Australian Business Foundation, ThinkEvans undertook research and investigation into how the Fair Work system impacts the productivity of businesses in Australia….