Archive for governance

Hot Off the Press: “All About Governance”

August 24, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, governance

A while back, I wrote about net neutrality, and my team and I wondered whether it belonged on my professional blog – covering leadership, strategy, collaboration, and governance topics – or if it was better suited to the personal one. Intuitively I felt it should go here. But it wasn’t until I created my online journal on governance that the reason came clear: net neutrality is essentially a governance issue.

All About Governance is a journal I started a few months ago to help me keep tabs on how we’re talking and thinking about governance, and in what areas. The journal monitors a broad range of international news organs, pundits and popular perspectives I’ve chosen to give me a view of the world. These are then filtered by “governance” as well as related subjects such as collaboration, leadership, and decision-making.

The journal has proved to be a highly efficient tool for assimilating a lot of information, from which I am able to identify larger themes and trends. One of these is that governance is playing an increasingly important role in many of today’s big issues – from net neutrality to Arab Spring to the debt ceiling debacle to education reform and more. The underlying trend of all these issues is toward greater participation, transparency, and accountability in decision-making, which challenges existing governance.

Common to these issues is also a call for adaptable, learning governance systems that are responsive to varying timeframes (emergencies to 100 years or more).  And for governance that can open to bring in more information and ideas when needed, and close in so a few highly capable and accountable decision-makers can deftly handle situations well-understood and of critical importance. And in either case, decisions must be monitored for results, and decision-makers must communicate their decisions and be held accountable for them. This is what governance can be designed to do.

But something else All About Governance has reminded me is that governance is still a tricky topic. For something playing so powerful a role, there is way too much confusion over what exactly governance is, how it affects us and what we can do about it.

As I read All About Governance, I notice “governance” is still often used interchangeably with “government” or even “governing.” And, perhaps because governance is the underpinning of both, it tends to get overlooked. Leadership’s lack of agility, both in identifying governance as the source of a problem and in redesigning it for optimal effectiveness, leads only to more problems. Our rapidly changing times demand high level governance acuity among leaders.

Toward this end, I am making All About Governance available to you.

We plan to publish All About Governance each week on the RRC Facebook page as well as on Twitter. This way, you can easily join me in viewing world events as they relate to and are affected by governance. For more direct and timely access, please feel free to subscribe to All About Governance and it will be delivered daily to your inbox.

Do join me in reading All About Governance. As a leader, can you afford not to? I look forward to your insights and comments.

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What’s Hospitality Got to Do with It?

August 16, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Collaboration, Facilitation, governance, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations, Technology

Collaboration’s time has come. And it’s time to get everyone, not just talking about it,
but really good at doing it. Collaboration isn’t a set of tech tools or an ideal. It’s a verb – something we do. And we can do it well or really poorly. What makes the difference? The answer might surprise you: hospitality.

What’s hospitality got to do with it, you may wonder. Everything.

The simple concept of hospitality is the foundation of collaboration. By “collaboration” I mean convening – whether in government, business, or community, in person, on the phone or online – a group of people, diverse in background and perspective, toward a common purpose. The supposition is that the people being convened are in some way unknown to each other: either actual strangers meeting for the first time or at least people who have among them unknown, foreign or differing perspectives. It is to this meeting of strangers that hospitality speaks.

Abraham Offering Hospitality

The concept of hospitality comes to us from ancient times when people depended on each other in a way we don’t as much today, at least not in the developed world. There were far fewer of us then and there were great distances between our encampments. Travel was arduous, dirty and dangerous, making hospitality not merely a matter of kindness, but also of survival.

Strangers arriving at your door was not an uncommon event, and hospitality dictated how you treated them. Welcome with a bath, food, and drink, a place to sleep – this kind of hospitality seems extreme and is unthinkable for most of us today. And yet, its vestiges still hold as our protocol for overnight company and in hotels the world over.

Although the concept of hospitality has equivalents in all ancient languages, the English word comes from the Latin hospes. Interestingly, hospes refers both to the host and to the guest, as does the Greek counterpart xenos. This ambiguity of the term still exists in modern derivatives of Latin, for example, the Italian word ospite. I remember when I first lived in Italy 20 years ago this confused me plenty: was I invited to the party or to host the party? The root of my confusion was, of course, my mother tongue, which divides the concept: host (from hospes) and guest (from the German gast, meaning stranger). I remember vaguely wondering why the Italians suffered under this confusion, thinking that they must somehow be bereft of vocabulary.

Today, hospitality has come to signify more of a nicety than a necessity. And yet, there is a renewed need for it. The technology of travel means that we can get anywhere pretty much any time, and the technology of information means we can do so virtually in seconds. The borders of our encampments, both geographical and ideological, constantly bump up against each other now, bringing new resonance to the notion of hospitality. We are being called to apply hospitality to the entryways, not just of our homes, but of our hearts and minds. Collaboration begins here.

Collaboration is hospitality on steroids. If you’re the convener, it’s as if a caravan of travelers has descended on your doorstep, and what’s more, you invited them. And there’s something you need from them, so making sure they feel welcome, they’re clear about the purpose of the visit, and how they’re going to get their needs met are all essential to a genial, productive relationship. The adept collaboration convener plans for these logistics well before any of the participant guests arrive (see more on this here).

In the same way ancient hospitality ritualized the treatment of strangers in the
home, collaboration calls for ritual that welcomes strange opinions and foreign modes of self-expression in the conversation. The ritual itself signals the participant that “strangers” are indeed welcome. And like all ritual, it is the attitude behind it that endows its meaning. Anyone can go through the motions of hospitality, but it is the feeling of the open heart that makes us know we are welcome. Collaboration is ultimately defined by this.

But there’s another important dimension of hospitality at work today that takes us further into territory useful for collaboration. The Latin hospes is formed
from hostis, which meant “to have power,” and the Online Etymology Dictionary gives the literal translation of “host” as “lord of strangers.” Where the ancients took for granted the roles of guest and host as sacrosanct in the ritual of hospitality, today we push against such conventional relationships.

Jacques Derrida, originator of deconstruction, put this hospitality power dynamic into sharp relief for us. What Derrida saw was that hospitality is a paradox: what makes hospitality possible is ultimately what makes it impossible. If being hospitable requires that someone has the power to host, which means, in some measure, the ability to control the guest, then, says Derrida, this control is, in fact, inhospitable. On the other hand, if hospitality means the host is obligated to welcome without rules or boundaries whoever arrives (say, a complainer, or worse, a thief or harm doer), then the host is stripped of the very power and control that makes hospitality possible.

Derrida’s reasoning is, I think, instructive for collaboration as well. If I convene a
collaborative process and act as host by creating the rules and protocols by which the “guests” will participate, haven’t I taken control, thereby constricting the participants and undermining the very goal of collaboration itself? The goal being an interaction of equals toward a shared creation. And if, on the other hand, the convener does not act as host, does not develop and maintain process rules and governance, thereby causing chaos or a survival-of-the-fittest contest of wills among the participants, won’t many feel disenfranchised and leave? And again, the goal of collaboration is unrealized.

Derrida’s hospitality paradox – and the peril of collaboration - lies in the apparent power struggle between the host and guest (convener and participant, in collaboration). It’s as if these roles sit opposite each other on a set of scales, with things weighted all on one side or the other. But the key to their balance is, for me, found in the, well, ambidextrousness of the ancients’ language.

The fact that the same word (hospes, xenos) represents both roles may not signify a dearth of vocabulary as I once thought, but rather a deep understanding of the very nature of hospitality itself. The ambiguity instructs me that guest and host are but two sides of the same coin, interchangeable among us. No one is always host and no one is always guest, no one always in control and no one always compliant.

Hospitality is the proscribed ritual for bringing strangers together well. The roles of host and guest are part of this ritual, but they are simply a means to the ultimate end of what hospitality intends. The key again comes from the ancients’ language. Hospes is the root of, not only hospitality, but also hospital and hospice. What these have in common, more than tending to the ill or a protocol for doing so, is the way that’s done. This is the essence of hospes: Caring for people.

It is the caring then that enlivens the ritual created for bringing people together
well and that acts as the fulcrum for the role of host on one side and that of
guest on the other, tempering the extremes of each. Caring is the both the underlying method and the intended outcome of hospitality.

The same is true for collaboration. Caring for each other in the process of collaboration, and caring for the higher purpose to which we all are invited as the ultimate outcome of it is the foundation of collaboration done well. As conveners, if we will remember this and let it guide our role as host, our participant guests will do what humans do in a hospitable environment: enjoy and learn from each other. Great things come from this and it is within our grasp.

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The Supremes: Why We Do What They Say (and Should We?)

July 13, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Facilitation, governance, Government, History, Law, Leadership

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer spoke last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was a stirring speech. He’s an eloquent and passionate speaker, and like all good orators, he got me to thinking.

Justice Breyer’s point was the importance of the Court to democracy. The Court serves the vital and essential function of a neutral actor in the mix to play referee, to stand in the fray and call foul, to stop the action and consider what really is fair, no matter the size or skill of the players. That sounds right. Without this role, games and democracies easily devolve to chaos or bullying. With this role, we can all relax into our own – whether as player or spectator.

I recognize the referee role only too well since I play a similar one. As a facilitator of process, I design and then monitor the way something gets done. The larger and more diverse the group, the more contentious the issues, the more important this work is — if I hold the space and monitor the established rules of engagement, the people participating can relax into dealing with the subject at hand. It can take a while to establish trust in this role, there may even be tests – people pushing the limits of the “rules” to see if they can be bent or broken, to see if I will notice, if I will act. But if I play it fairly, applying the same rules to everyone, people will stop worrying over process and really start attending to the issues.

So, when Justice Breyer recounted his story of this country’s test of the Supreme Court’s authority, I listened with great interest. The heart of the story involved two moments in American history. The first was in the 1830s, from when our democracy was still young. At the time, the state of Georgia, having found gold on Cherokee Indian land, wanted the Indians out. In a series of cases, known as the Marshall Trilogy, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote decisions that set precedent for tribal sovereignty. Breyer then referred to President Jackson’s response “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Although this quotation is disputed, it is undoubtedly representative of Jackson’s sentiments. He sent federal troops into Georgia to move the Cherokee off their lands, disregarding the Marshall Court and inciting what would result in the Trail of Tears.

Breyer’s point was, early in our nation’s history, the Court was still establishing the authority of its supreme arbiter role. And clearly, that power was dubious at best if the President so readily flouted it.

Breyer then turned to a case much more familiar: Brown v. Board of Education. Although the landmark case ruled segregation unconstitutional in 1954, it took three more years for it to be tested. As we all know, the test happened in the fall of 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock’s school board and the NAACP planned to have nine carefully chosen students enroll at Central High. Governor Orval Faubus wouldn’t hear of it and called out the Arkansas National Guard to block the students. Like Jackson, according to Breyer, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops – and his choice of the 101st Airborne was brilliant strategy since the 101st was beloved for its role in Normandy. This time the troops backed the Supreme Court’s decision.

Breyer’s argument was that, even if we disagree with a decision, Bush v. Gore for example, or Roe v. Wade, the fact is that we, as a country, as a democracy, depend on the authority of the Court as our supreme arbiter, as the final say. And, what’s more, we adhere to it. For those of us who think we want the Court’s decisions challenged, Justice Breyer urged us to look carefully at the images of anarchy coming from places around the globe. Do we really want to live in a country where the role of referee is tenuous, even nonexistent?

His question is a good one. But then a fellow from the audience asked another.

“Would the cynicism toward the Court be reduced if the decisions could be 6-3 instead of 5-4?” Justice Breyer responded to this question by talking about our desire for a Court more in agreement with itself, citing Europe’s policy not to publish dissenting opinions as a way of solidifying the rule of law. This surprised me. What I heard in the fellow’s question was not a desire for more agreement, but for less partisanship among the Justices.

Too many of the major decisions (e.g., Citizens United and Wal-Mart v. Dukes) being made by the Court are being decided 5-4, with the conservative Justices (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito) on one side and the liberal ones (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) on the other. It is this, more than what the actual decisions are, that is so inimical to our trust in the Court as the neutral actor we need it to be. This partisanship is what is eroding our confidence in the Court as the ultimate power of judicial review in this country. If the Court can do no better than Congress in deciding the issues that threaten to tear us apart, if the Court is no more than a reflection of the rancor and polarity that run through our public discourse, then the Court is no longer deserving of the role of supreme arbiter and the ensuing powers that role commands.

Like any leader, I am only able to function as an effective facilitator as long as the people I serve perceive me as such. When I start to show bias, when I begin to take sides, especially if I do so under the guise of fairness, I am no longer useful in my role. If I do not correct my behavior, or step aside, the people will (and should) take care of it themselves. This too is inherent to democracy. In fact, it is the very idea upon which this country was founded: equal justice under the law.

For a related blog from Aspen Institute: http://www.aspeninstitute.org/about/blog/does-supreme-court-follow-people

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Expiration Date on Governance

May 27, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, governance, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations

Ever noticed that governance only lasts so long before it shows signs of aging? Those signs that governance has lost its luster, its relevance, its meaning, some of which include:

1) Decisions don’t hold in the organization – they are second-guessed or ignored.

2) Decisions seem to made willy-nilly, in a duplicative manner, or take forever.

3) Governing bodies are apathetic, contentious, or both.

4) People complain about not knowing how decisions are made or how they can affect them.

Governance reaching its expiration date is a routine happenstance in organizations. What isn’t so routine is the ability to recognize the early symptoms of past-due governance and do something about them before the organization experiences what can result: low productivity, morale problems, and leadership turnover. The odd thing about governance is how little explicit attention is paid to it when, in fact, it drives one of the key assets of any organization: the ability to crank out robust, well understood, actionable decisions.

For this reason, at the outset of a consultancy, one of the first questions I ask is how well does the organization make decisions? Fortunately, people don’t need governance expertise to answer; everyone in an organization is usually aware of how well decision-making works. Think about your own. If your response is a grimace or a roll of the eyes, governance is likely at its expiration date.

One board I worked with complained bitterly that things weren’t getting done, board membership was down, and meetings were poorly attended. Staff pointed to board and board to staff as the source of the problem. When I asked if the board had committees and how they were working, the reply was they had them, and they used to work well, but now they rarely met and produced little. Why doesn’t a solid set of committees, with clear charters and a roster of able members last? Why does governance have an expiration date? The answer is simple: things change.

For instance, say you and I are going to dinner. The decision about where to go will be made fairly easily and will not require much governance, in other words, we won’t need formalized process, roles, responsibilities, or authority to make the decision. However, if you and I need to meet for dinner once each month, the decision about where to go may need a bit more governance. That is, if I always choose the restaurant, without an explicit agreement about this role giving me the authority to do it, you may become unhappy and after a few months, revolt. Or worse, you stop showing up for dinner.

Then let’s say we ask ten others to join us in our monthly dinner – now the governance needs to be designed in such a way as to consider all involved, be transparent to them, and perhaps even be written down to ensure adherence to what was agreed. People like clarity about how decisions are made; the more complex the organization and its decisions, the more important governance becomes.

And, no matter how well it is designed, just like planning and leadership, governance  needs to be reviewed and refreshed from time to time. This is because there are many factors in play affecting governance that are in a constant state of flux. For instance, world forces change (e.g. new restaurants open), internal culture shifts (people with food allergies join in), people move about (some of us come from the suburbs), and skills develop (a few of us take a cooking class).

The more an organization understands that decision-making is one of its most prized assets, the more attentive it should be to governance. An organization’s ability to see its governance as simply the mechanism that produces efficient decision-making, and then to analyze governance effectiveness and redesign it when indicated, is an organization well-suited to today’s pace of change.

If governance seems like a bureaucratic annoyance, consider how decisions are made in your organization. Without clear, relevant governance, chaos reigns and people get cranky. Great governance, on the other hand, operates invisibly, all the while creating trust inside an organization and inspiring confidence outside it.

Is it time to check the expiration date where you are?

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Teamwork, Collaboration and Accountabilty: We’re Talking Governance

May 12, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, governance, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations, Technology

Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s recent blog post, Cisco and a Cautionary Tale about Teams, deftly correlates several key factors challenging organizational leadership today. Kanter says: “With buzz about self-organizing social networks increasingly dominating the world, and organizations of all sizes in all fields seeking more collaboration, it is worth pausing to revisit exactly what teamwork means.” Exactly. Leadership must consider the kind of “teamwork” that is desired in their organizations and then build the structure and process to foster it.

First though, let’s consider what Kanter means by “teamwork.” She is talking about how groups of people are organized to make decision-making and work efficient and effective. And different organizations desire and require different types of teamwork: some more collaborative, some less, some more integrative, some more specialized. And what kind of teamwork is needed in different organizations, and even in different parts of the same organization, is what is being called into question.

The traditional models of organizational structure (top down, command and control, silos of activity) that operated as the gold standard are being challenged on a variety of fronts, and that means it’s time for innovation. But for this to happen, leadership needs first to increase their capability in discussing organizational structure, and see doing so as answering a set of strategic questions. What decisions are made and where, with what input, in what timeframe, with what impacts on the particular “product” and with what tolerance by the specific organizational culture are all fundamentals of the governance conversation. Indeed, governance lies at the heart of much institutional angst right now.

The types of governance that have worked in the past, in areas well-known and understood (like financial management, HR, etc.), are being called into question in the newer arenas of technology and knowledge management. And this development coincides with the democratization of information (24/7 access to just about anything) that technology is pushing, as well as the demand for greater transparency and involvement in decision-making, that is itself a product of access. Because of these forces, governance in all our institutions is in a state of upheaval, with leadership being pushed to transform it. But if leadership is not fluent in the language of governance and the questions that need to be asked, with a solid understanding of the forces at work that are applying the pressure, leadership will find itself repeatedly designing and redesigning its governance to little effect.

And we see this in the preponderance of reorganizations. But governance redesign is much, much more than a reorg. Governance redesign means asking and answering basic questions about the type of decision-making the organization desires – overall and in specific areas within it. For example, as Kanter points out, a technology company by definition needs to be more agile in its decision-making than, say, an academic institution, in order to remain competitive and relevant in the rapidly evolving marketplace. At the same time, innovation is often the product of collaboration and so both agility and a collaborative environment may be desired. But since agile decision-making is generally at odds with the pace of more collaborative decision-making involving varied groups of people, this inherent tension will need to be reconciled in the governance structure that is created. Finding this balance will require innovative thinking about and design of governance, so leadership needs to get much more agile itself in governance stewardship acumen.

Kanter also brings up the notion of accountability. One of the reasons for command and control is that both authority and accountability are clear - in fact, one client of mine went so far as to say that only an individual can be accountable, never a group. To the contrary, I have worked with highly successful nonprofit boards where both collaboration and shared authority are givens. As Kanter says, leadership still exists in collaborative governance structures, but only if it is well designed and communicated. Where the governance model includes broader input and increased transparency, the charter, in which clear lines of authority and responsibility are described – even if in entirely new ways, gains renewed prominence. Unfortunately, many charters sit on dusty shelves because they are verbose, unclear, and considered just a formality.

And this is perhaps the state of governance overall: dusty, verbose, unclear and considered a formality. When in fact, clear governance, whatever the particular model, is the very fiber of teamwork, the foundation of organizational culture, the catapult to greatness or to a stunning lack thereof.

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Governance: Getting Beyond Power

April 15, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds governance, Leadership, Policy

Since the word “governance” is so variously understood (and misunderstood), I will start by defining it: simply, governance is the structures, roles and processes by which decision-making is accomplished. Governance exists anywhere decisions are made by groups of people – whether in organizations, governments, even families.

Okay, you might be thinking, but what about power? Isn’t governance really about power? That is a common way people think about governance, and it’s understandable because, think about it, decision-making is considered power. “I am the decider” and all that. But what I hope to convey and focus my clients on is not the power grab that governance discussions so often devolve to (not a very evolved modality, to be sure), but rather consideration of how best to design governance so that decision-making in an organization is effortless, effective and clear.

The idea here is that decisions should flow like water – they should be the product of decision-making made easy by optimally designed governance. The same kind of optimization we want in an irrigation system or healthy watershed. We don’t want water impeded, stagnating, or flowing in too small trickles (or too big floods) because all this leads to bad water quality. The same principle applies to decisions. Decisions are, after all, the life blood of the organization. All action is driven by them, and if decisions are made badly (without the right input, at the right time, on the right subjects), the resulting action is likely to be ineffective.

So, governance is like water pipes, or an irrigation system, or a watershed of rivers, streams and cascading waterfalls, all engineered to deliver clean, abundant water. Good governance creates optimal decision-making, which results in desired decisions.

It is surprisingly easy to know if an organization’s governance is effective or not. When governance is well-designed, it works; when governance works, decisions hold, drive effective action, and make for institutional resiliency. When governance isn’t working:

  • decisions don’t hold (they are second-guessed or ignored)
  • there is duplicative decision-making – different entities addressing the same decisions (causing not only extra expense, but also confusion: a key source of low morale)
  • and lack of trust develops between decision-making fiefdoms, causing institutional weakness

In my 20 years of work with executive leadership teams, most clients initially seek my expertise in strategic planning and high level problem solving. Out of these processes, I noticed early on that many organizational problems originate with a lack of clarity and agreement around decision-making. I also found that there is a nearly universal short-coming in leadership capability regarding governance, i.e., how to talk about it effectively, understand how it works, and know how to design it so it works optimally.

Governance is generally equated with either the org chart or an architecture of rules (the area of information technology, being newer than most other business support areas such as HR or finance, deals more explicitly with governance as a result). Both the org chart and the rules are indeed part of governance, but only represent a small portion of the total governance picture. And, interestingly, this fractional approach to governance can be a bigger problem than little to no governance awareness at all because in this case, governance is built in a lopsided manner, with loads of detail in some areas and next to nothing in others. This leads, not surprisingly, to confusion. To help organizations surface governance, if it is indeed a problem, my strategic planning model includes an evaluation of it as part of an overall organizational capacity assessment.

A cornerstone of the governance approach I take is starting with a strategic evaluation of the types of decisions being made and how the organization currently groups decisions into specific “decision sets.” The way decisions are grouped is a simple but profound element of governance that often gets little or no attention, when, in fact, it is the originating governance element. This is so because we only need all that governance spells out to produce a decision. It is the decision that is the product of governance, not the power of the person(s) making it.

Decision sets are so part of the fabric of an organization that they can become invisible. More often than not, it is the way decisions are grouped that has become outmoded and/or so entrenched that stagnation and stove-piping is the result. This may seem too insignificant an issue to make a real difference, but in fact, the way decisions are grouped affects every part of governance and decision-making in an organization. The review of current decision sets prompts a rethinking of how decisions could be more optimally arranged to foster the type of analysis, in the right timeframe, with the expertise needed to produce robust and lasting decisions in the organization.

A simple yet illustrative example involves decisions about money. Many organizations group decisions about how to allocate financial resources together in the same governance process; however, if annual budget decisions are made in the same environment as long-term investment decisions, budget decisions will generally trump those pertaining to long-term investment. The general principle here is that in addition to the type of decision being made (funding), the timeframe it relates to should also be considered when grouping decisions. Putting decisions with vastly different timeframes together can cause the shorter-term to overshadow the longer-term (squeaky wheel syndrome). The idea of developing governance structure that considers the timeframe of decisions is a simple one that can have a substantial impact on improving decision-making in an organization.

This approach to governance evaluation and redesign can be considered strategic governance, as opposed to what is normally done: start with the org chart and shuffle people (and budgets) around. (“Reorg fever” is often a symptom of a lack of leadership understanding and capability around governance.) My approach to governance does address the org chart, because ultimately decision-making needs to reside with chartered entities that have clear authority and accountability. However, doing the higher level definition and structural work early on keeps the governance conversation from devolving into a power grab, and makes selecting the most appropriate decision-making entities much more obvious (based on expertise and stake in the decision set, as opposed to mere position inside the organization).

The result is governance that serves the organization, rather than a few well-positioned individuals. Sound like a good idea?

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