Governance has moved on. Have we?

One of the dangers of having been around as long as I have is that you can remember when things felt simpler. Good governance meant having the right number of trustees, holding the required number of meetings, approving the accounts, politely ignoring the fact that many trustees hadn’t read the papers – and making sure nobody had accidentally spent the reserves on an alpaca sanctuary in Peru.  

The world has changed — a lot 

Charity leaders and trustees today are dealing with: rising demand; shrinking resources; political uncertainty; staffing pressures; culture wars; social media; increasing scrutiny and changing expectations from staff, funders and the public – and to top it all off a whole raft of folk ready to jump on us if we get anything wrong.  

And just in case all of that feels like a walk in the park, artificial intelligence has come galloping over the horizon yelling, ‘Don’t worry, I can do that for you.’  Honestly, there are days when it feels like hiding under the duvet feels like an entirely proportionate strategic response. 

Leadership and governance have changed as the world has changed and it’s affecting how we run our charities – and if you think it isn’t, you haven’t been paying attention (or reading the board papers….😉)  

Beyond compliance 

Modern governance is about much more than compliance – increasingly, it’s about judgement, relationships and the ability to make good decisions when there simply isn’t an obvious right answer. 

Decisions facing charity leaders and trustees have never really been easy – but I think they’re even harder now because the world in which we live is increasingly unpredictable.  

Hard questions, no easy answers 

How much of our reserves should we spend when demand is soaring? What do we stop doing when everything we do feels important? How loudly should we campaign when public debate is increasingly polarised? How do we embrace the opportunities presented by AI without either behaving as though it is Satan’s laptop or enthusiastically uploading the entire donor database to it?  And currently, what the hell do we do about the toilets! 

These are all governance questions, but they won’t be answered by simply producing another policy on the shared drive. They require trust between boards and executive teams, clarity about who is responsible for what, curiosity about what we might be missing and the confidence to challenge each other without every disagreement turning into a constitutional crisis. 

Courage isn’t recklessness 

Governance also require courage, because one of my worries is that sometimes, in our determination to be responsible, we accidentally become timid. We can start to confuse good governance with avoiding risk, when charities exist precisely because something in the world needs to change. Change inevitably involves risk and, if your governance arrangements succeed in removing every conceivable risk, congratulations – you may also have removed any possibility of achieving your mission. 

Courage doesn’t mean recklessness, of course. It means creating the conditions in which intelligent risks can be taken. It means having honest conversations, listening to people who see things differently and recognising that disagreement can actually improve a decision. It also means recognising that inclusion, culture, power and lived experience aren’t fluffy things to discuss once the ‘proper governance’ has been dealt with – they fundamentally affect what we notice, what we overlook, what we challenge and ultimately the quality of the decisions we make. 

The need to keep learning 

More importantly, good governance requires us to keep learning because the world isn’t going to stand still while we lovingly polish our terms of reference. AI alone is forcing boards to think differently about data, ethics, transparency, accountability and risk and if you’re not devoting plenty of board time to those issues you’re not doing the job. 

Further, campaigning is raising difficult questions about voice, legitimacy and reputation. Funding pressures are demanding much harder conversations about sustainability, while changing expectations of leadership are making us think again about power, wellbeing and organisational culture. 

Why this summit matters 

That is why we’ve created the new DSC Charity Leadership and Governance Summit starting on Wednesday 7 October: two days bringing together CEOs, directors, trustees, chairs and future leaders to wrestle with these questions properly. (Learn more here)

Not because any of us has all the answers – anyone claiming they do should probably be approached with caution – but because good leadership and governance have never really been about knowing everything. 

What we need now is the curiosity to keep learning, the humility to recognise when the world has changed, and the courage to ask better questions when it does. 

And, ideally, reading the board papers as if they matter (spoiler alert – they do!)