Client: General Council, Missionary Society of St Columban The Missionary Society of St Columban includes ordained priests and lay missionaries and is currently present in 16 countries around the world. The Society works across boundaries of culture and religion – with poor and exploited people, seeking justice and dignity for those denied their rights, and,…
Tag: governance
COVID: no longer everything-everywhere-all-the-time
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…
Mind the gap: between law and custom
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…
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…
Mind the gap: of missed opportunities or threats
Much to our surprise, recently we have had a return to board conversations about the dangers of developing tunnel vision on an organisation’s competitive situation – the sort of situation where a board doesn’t know what it doesn’t know and gets caught out. Our surprise about how often this is cropping up is partly because…
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…
Corona coffee: still time for (plenty of) refills
Stop press: Well not really, this is hardly a newsflash when the project is some months in, but it is another moment in getting to the finish line with one of our special initiatives for the covidtimes. Our resident expert on all things governance and accountability, Managing Director Carolyn Evans, has at last received the…
Corona coffee: and now the long brew time
It’s done. In the latest chapter of ‘what to do when you are locked down in a pandemic’, our Managing Director Carolyn has sent the full manuscipt of her forthcoming book to the publisher to be delivered into the waiting hands of typesetters. But don’t start holding your breath in anticipation just yet. Typesetting is…
Corona coffee: just add caffeine
Whoosh – or at least, whoosh in the sense of the usually-glacially-slow-publishing-process, raised to the power of a COVID-induced-reality! It is a common story to hear how book projects take considerably longer than expected, have myriad delays, and come to fruition long after might have been expected in comparison to commercial projects. Not this time…
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…
Corona coffee: getting a WFH dividend
As consultants who have used a flexible working approach for our entire corporate existence (like, since before it became trendy, or now a necessity due to COVID-19), working from home is not exactly novel, and we have come in to the corona coffee era with more than a few relevant skills. Not least, we are…
Corona coffee: less barista, more home-brew
Like everyone, we are a bit stunned by the onset of COVID-19 as a world-wide phenomenon, and scrambling to work out what living and working in a coronavirus reality will look like. As a niche business that survived the 2008 GFC, and actually thrived in that environment, we’d like to think we can work it…
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,…
For the record …
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’…
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…
It’s not just you …
If you thought the last two years were just a bit odd, with everything blowing hot and cold on a seemingly random basis, it really isn’t just you. We may have come to expect that from climate-change induced weather, but political leaders in many places have been giving the weather a run for its money….
Women in Community: sunset or sunrise?
Client: Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart, NSW Region This project responded to a felt need for a fresh look at a long-standing initiative of the Sisters, to answer the question of what options there may be for this initiative to continue to serve an evolving community. The project team has now reviewed…
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,…
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…