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Never Waste a Crisis:   3 Tips on Impactful Decision-Making for Charity Boards 

November 4, 2020 By Dr. Angelika Love

Boards are tasked with providing strategic oversight. But the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted some charity boards to become more heavily involved with day-to-day operational activities. Shifting the focus from the here-and-now to more medium- to long-term strategic issues will be essential if boards are to keep their organisations on track. What can boards do to ensure that their decisions lead to effective governance and oversight during a period of remote work, distraction and volatility?  

This autumn, Leapwise partnered with New Philanthropy Capital on a pro bono project to support the sector. We interviewed CEOs and Chairs of UK charities as well as board advisory experts, collected new data from trustees, and integrated their best-practice insights with our knowledge on decision-science.  

You can read the whole report here and our top tips on more effective meetings here. But what can boards do to translate productive discussions into impactful decisions? 

Take a systematic approach to your decisions

Allocate Decision Roles

Keep a Decision-Log

3 Tips for Better Decision-Making 

38% of trustees we surveyed said they would make creating better follow-through on board decisions their priority if they could change just one thing about board meetings. We encourage you to use the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic to consider the decision-making infrastructure at your organisation.  

  1. Take a systematic approach to your decisions 

Chairs and board development experts we interviewed recommended taking a systematic approach to decisions. This can help reduce uncertainty and free-up decision-making capacities. 

  • Area of governance: Clarity on the area of decision-making can help your board discover whether it is allocating appropriate time to different areas of governance and which criteria may be appropriate to make good decisions. 
  • Evaluation criteria: Are you comparing options against their impact on staff morale, what your supporters think, or how well they align with your funders’ goals? Rating different options against criteria can be helpful. 
  • Type of problem: Leapwise uses the Cynefin Framework,iii developed by Dave Snowden for IBM, to help organisations think about the situations they are confronting. It distinguishes between simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic decision-making contexts that warrant different types of responses. 
  1. Allocate decision roles  

Decision-making involves not just ‘the decider’ but also others with clearly outlined roles in the process. For charity boards, they will involve both trustees and members of the executive.  

Role clarity is essential, especially where speed and agility matter. Coordination improves and response times become quicker when role assignment becomes routine.iv Conversely, when there is ambiguity over who is accountable for which aspect of the process, decision-making can stall.  

Use the RAPID framework to create role clarity. This framework distinguishes between: 

  • People who recommend a decision or action. 
  • Those who have to formally agree to a decision. 
  • Those who are accountable for performing a decision once it has been made. 
  • People who provide input into a decision. 
  • And the person who takes the final decision.  

Make sure each decision-item has a designated person in charge whose expertise match the decision being taken. 

  1. Keep a decision-log 

To avoid duplicating decisions, and to keep chief executives accountable, keep a logbook of decisions that have been made by the board. A decision log also serves as a useful hand-over document for new trustees.  

The decision-log could include information on decision-roles; timelines; and the state of implementation of any decisions you made. Importantly, information on implementation can help you establish whether any intervention you may take to improve follow-through is effective.  

Many governing bodies may be reluctant to review their decision-making processes. Instead they will say: “When we are very busy, how can we take time to do these things?” In our report, we introduce you to many small and low-risk changes that you can trial in your charity – especially during a period of uncertainty and change.  

We understand that boards often do not have the time or headspace to take on big changes in how they make decisions. But try making small adjustments to your processes, evaluating their effects against a set of pre-determined improvement criteria, and then decide whether or not to stick with your new approach. By adopting such a ‘validated learning’-mindset, you can elicit incremental and sustainable change.  

The truth is that one-off exercises do not create the core infrastructure charities need to become truly decisive and effective. For that, we need to build effective decision-making habits bit by bit.  

“Don’t expect to go from zero to ten; also be satisfied with a journey of continuous improvement and learning.” (Chair) 

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Value Information – But Not For Its Own Sake: Decision Science for Police Leaders

September 28, 2020 By Tom Gash

Key Lesson # 3 from Decision Science: a New Resource for Police Leaders. This lesson is an excerpt and you can download the full guide here.

Police performance depends on millions of decisions – at the frontline and in the board room. Can the sector strengthen its decision-making muscles by harnessing insights from decision sciences?

Key Lesson #3: Value Information – But Not For Its Own Sake

Decision-makers all need information to choose wisely. Who can forget the time that the bomb squad blew up a suspicious vehicle outside Workington Police station only to find it was there because fellow officers had parked it after helping its owner (who was unwell) and then failed to mention it to their colleagues? More seriously, who can forget the damning verdict of the Bichard Inquiry, which found systematic information sharing weaknesses that left Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman at risk from Ian Huntley.

With the rise of various information-gathering tools – drones, CCTV, thermal imaging, cell tower analytics – there is more data available to policing than ever before. But today, policing needs to answer the question of how it ensures information is accessed when it is needed, and presented and processed in ways that support better decisions. While policing has made major progress in its data management, but there is a long way to go. To take one priority area, data quality remains dangerously poor, for example.

My belief is that we would make faster progress not by trying to collect ever-more data, but by focusing on the decisions policing needs to make regularly – and particularly those that drive police effectiveness. If we focus on decisions, we can then concentrate on providing (and quality assuring) the information that genuinely supports these decisions, building information formats that are easy to access and interpret, and creating feedback loops that allow officers and staff at all levels of policing to learn about the consequences of their decisions and actions.

This approach not dissimilar to the admirable data-driven policing approach being taken in Avon and Somerset, who have focused on creating user-friendly ‘apps’ based on requests from those working in the organization. But there may be opportunities to go further, including by:

  • reminding decision-makers of overarching goals and priorities (see Lesson #1 in this series)
  • presenting data in ways that overcomes some of our human weaknesses in understanding risk and probability
  • building stronger feedback on the results of past decisions
  • automating or partially automating decision-making when it is heavily rules-based

Of course, data collection and storage has become cheaper than ever before – and this trend will likely continue in the coming years. But we need to be supremely vigilant about the fact that data is worthless until it is interpreted and actually influences the decisions we make.

This is a version of an article produced for Police Professional.

You can download the full guide complete with all 7 key lessons for police leaders below.

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