Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) chairman, Kevin Carey, considers what a move towards a conversational culture rather than a reporting culture could do for the governance of charities.

Ever since the town worthies sat in discreet judgement of their poorer fellows, leaving Mr. Bumble sparingly to dispense, or not, the gruel which was as meanly given as it was hungrily taken, there has been a sharp line in the charitable sector between policy and implementation. If I had had a bowl of gruel for every time I’ve been told that governance is about policy and that the chief executive and officers get on with the implementation, I’d not be screaming for more. In fact, I’m so full up with this nonsense that I’m screaming for less.

The idea that the great and the good should undertake the ‘governance’, leaving paid people (and volunteers) to do the dirty work is so deeply ingrained that it has received massive, post hoc, intellectual justification which now stretches, in many charities, as far as the ‘governance’ function merely nodding through budget cuts that deeply affect end-user services.

At RNIB everything we do starts with end users: our mass membership feeds into the choice and design of our services; its elected representatives provide us with a consultative forum, sit on our programme boards and elect some of our board; and our board itself is almost entirely made up of end users. So it would be surprising if there were not a demand for governance involvement in implementation but our problem is how to get the balance right.

In order to get over the problem of the policy/ implementation split we have abandoned our traditional committee structure, largely based on local government, and have established programme boards. These combine trustees, membership representatives, officers and external experts to deal with strategy and sharp, presenting issues but these have faced three problems:

 

• first, because programmes aren’t directly aligned with line management (managers have to make deals with each other) there’s a problem of designing systems that provide clarity in budget control;
• secondly, the documentation tends either to be ‘high-level’ proposals or fairly high-level retrospective reporting; and
• thirdly, we haven’t yet managed to develop a conversational, as opposed to a reporting and receiving culture.

Looked at it from a conventional standpoint, I have been a relative failure. I'm blind, which has cut my life chances and my income compared with my peers and I never achieved my ambitions of being a journalist, a politician and, later, a charity director; But: I’ve lived a rich life in more than 80 countries, improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people;  I chair RNIB, the leading blindness charity in the world; I have studied politics, philosophy and theology and enjoy teaching and preaching; I’ve just published my first novel and there are more in the can; I enjoy a variety of families, domestic, church and work; I have never met anybody I’d swap with.

And it’s the third of these which is my big issue.

I’ve long thought that the two things that make quite ordinary people go absolutely bonkers are giving them a red sports car or making them a charity trustee. People who behave perfectly properly in almost all circumstances suddenly take on a patina of self-importance. I don’t think we suffer from this at RNIB because of the way we carefully select and conscientiously elect our trustees but we still can’t escape the culture of formalism. We behave formally and management responds formally. Getting people to sit round a table and pretend it’s the kitchen table is a real struggle. You want to say: “So tell me what happened when you went to qqq? What went well and what went wrong?” But instead you say: “Why is the RAG (red, amber, green) status of the programme amber?” And then you get all kinds of general reasons why it was red, is amber and will soon be green. And you cross that off the list with a sigh of relief, knowing that it won’t be long before all the projects are green. Job done.

But it isn’t. You can’t make sensible decisions unless you know whether a problem is intractable or manageable, deep-rooted or temporary.

Our best example is the employment of blind and partially-sighted people. For 50 years we’ve been trying to raise the number of our people in full-time, reasonably-paid employment but the numbers have been very stubborn. If we want to decide whether to go on investing in projects to persuade employers to give our people a chance, to experiment with social firms, to establish a self-employment loan fund or just to throw our hands in the air in utter desperation, we need to have a sense of what it’s really like at the sharp end. Programme boards need to have difficult discussions about the pain and the joy so that a sense of sharpness and urgency is injected into otherwise rather ‘high-level’ discussions at board level.

I would really like to get away from minutes, matters arising and a lot of the other governance paraphernalia that stops kitchen-table conversation between execs and non-execs. But this means more than fighting against the cultural tendency to avoid using plain English in favour of obfuscatory drivel, it actually means that we have to sign up to shared ownership of what happens at the sharp end; just as we agree to shared ownership of strategy.

Nobody at RNIB believes that the board owns the strategy while the officers own the implementation – officers draft the strategy and everyone is exercised by implementation – but the fictional split has a substantial influence on the way we think about ourselves and face our problems. Under current arrangements, non-execs are naturally worried about what goes on; and execs would be saintly if they weren’t just a little defensive, wanting to bring good news and handle any bad news ‘below’ governance level.

And it’s in that little word ‘below’ that the clue lies. Policy and strategy are necessary preconditions to implementation but they are not in a hierarchy of importance. We’ve largely wiped out patriarchy in family relations; let’s do the same for charities.