The post pandemic board - a new collaborative endeavour PR File - Flipbook - Page 10
10
The post pandemic board: a new collaborative endeavour
How boards are adapting
to the context
“Boards are moving beyond the transactional
to become networks and frameworks for
collaborative culture.”
The task of governing organisations, and the
collective skills required to do it properly, is
changing. Governance must be seen as inextricably
linked to an organisation’s purpose if it is to remain
effective. Organisations are responding to the
changing context by increasing their risk appetite
and balancing an interest in financial stability with
the need to change their business models ‘outside
in’. Regardless of whether they are a public service
or a retail product, they have no option but to meet
changing consumer or stakeholder expectations.
There is also a greater need for a more creative
and questioning approach by boards if all angles of
an issue are to be fully explored and investigated,
and if change and innovation are to thrive. As one
participant put it: “It’s about balancing a clear
understanding of the principles of governance with
a pragmatic willingness to meet the organisation
where it is”. Most organisational strategies are
subject to review in 2022; many prepared prior to
2022 have been overtaken by events and are now
being rebuilt for new circumstances and realities.
One participant made the observation that, prior to
2019, the boards that they had been on had showed
a tendency to be conformist and complianceoriented despite ‘capacity to innovate’ already being
recognised as a hallmark of effective boards. The
transactional nature of many boards at the time
perhaps hampered attempts at real innovation
and transformation. It may not have been until
circumstances changed in 2020 that boards were
pushed into a situation that required them to be truly
generative in how they worked, purely because they
were forced to find urgent solutions.
In a handful of cases, the pandemic period has
reversed the position of boards which previously
considered themselves to be more creative
and unstructured, putting them firmly back in
transactional mode where they could regain control
of their organisation’s purse-strings.
By and large, however, boards that are thriving in the
post pandemic era seem noticeably free-thinking,
open to new ideas and are characterised by a
higher degree of flexibility on every level. They
are necessarily more outward facing, constantly
working out how to balance the internal governance
focus with the implications of a rapidly changing
external context.
There are signs that this requirement alone may
quite profoundly be changing the focus of many
boards, especially those dependent on collaboration
or which have opportunities to respond through
merger and acquisition.
Where there are fewer blind spots in terms of the
Board’s collective awareness and coverage there are
fewer blind spots for the organisation itself. Today’s
more resilient and effective boards have fewer
technical specialists and more generalists, attuned
to the external environment and alert to public
scrutiny and community perceptions.