How can you make your board of trustees more adaptive and systemic?

It’s easy to say ‘we should be more flexible’ or ‘we should be more collaborative’. But how do you actually make it happen as a trustee with infrequent meetings and fixed legal responsibilities?

Thanks to the support of the Clothworkers’ Company, we recently held a discussion on how trustees can be more adaptive and systemic with:

• Tom Gash, Managing Director at Leapwise
• Lisa Jordan, Senior Managing Director and Europe Director at DRK Foundation
• Naomi Chapman, NPC’s Principal Consultant for Strategy

Here are 3 top tips from the event on practical steps you can take to creating a more strategic board: expect change, make sure trustees are getting a range of information, and work to create an open culture.

(This blog is based on notes taken at the event – any errors are mine, not the speakers’.)

Expect change, don’t just react to it

You’re probably used to having to deal with change. But even so, it’s still easy to feel surprised when it comes our way.

Re-focus your attention from how to react to change and towards how to prepare for change.

Think about how your strategy can handle change that might come. For example, having a high-level direction of travel, rather than fixed operational plans.

Becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and change starts with acknowledging that you can’t predict everything. Your strategy will be stronger if it has room to adjust. One way to achieve this  as a board is focusing on outcomes, not process – the what, not the how – and letting those delivering work make more decisions.

Make sure trustees are getting a range of information

If you’re a trustee, where are you getting your information from?

It’s easy for members of a board to end up ‘executive controlled’, only seeing the information that a leadership team gives you. Execs need to summarise and sense-make. But relying on management reports and key data points will lead board conversations towards what happened last week or last month.

To be more strategic, you want to avoid getting stuck in this loop of ‘firefighting’. You want to see the big picture. You need a strategic flow of information.

To get it, try ‘reaching in’ to your organisation. This means speaking to other staff members, outside the leadership team. It can also mean talking to service users, or attending events.

Outside perspectives can help too. You could try an informal ‘buddy scheme’ with trustees in similar organisations.

For internal or external perspectives, work on a ‘pick up the phone’ culture to problem solving – going proactively to find new perspectives and not just waiting until organised check-ins.

Work to create an open culture – starting with time

At the heart of creating a more responsive board is creating a more open culture. This is one where people feel able to speak freely on wider issues.

How can you create this? Start with time. A major barrier to a strategic approach is board meetings being too ‘agenda-ised’ – a controlled conversation.

Having an open space in the agenda to raise broader concerns is key. And that shouldn’t be at the end of the meeting, where it’s vulnerable to being squeezed.

What should be at the end of the meeting is 5 minutes to reflect on the meeting and how it went. This may seem unnecessary, but changing culture requires a way to track how culture is changing.

Another way to track a change in culture and encourage honest strategic reflection is the ‘fist to 5’ approach. This asks trustees to share their level of agreement out of 5 by holding up fingers. This allows for a rapid overview of sentiment, helps conversation to move on where the board are in agreement, and avoids the loudest voices dominating.

More broadly, an open culture is about reframing what it means to be a good trustee. It’s about asking good questions, not having all the answers.

Creating this culture allows for a more strategic approach. A board whose culture is focused on driving the mission forward allows for more reflection of what that mission is, and should be.

Conclusion

Taking a more strategic approach isn’t easy.

In the long-term, we heard at the event about starting to take a systems change approach and change the composition of your board to include more lived experience.

But the scale of the challenge shouldn’t put you off starting small. Expecting change, looking for new sources of information, and adding time for reflection are three first steps our speakers identified.

Even simpler, anything that helps you stop to think about strategic considerations can be a first step – even reading this blog!