Leading for Innovation: The Innovative Board: an Oxymoron?

A key theme of this year’s Trustee Conference is ‘innovation’.   Is innovation what you need? Some boards decide that they want the charity to stick at doing what it does best and not take any risks with anything new. This head in the sand attitude might work for a while, but in a changing and competitive world, most organisations need to think about some strategic innovations: innovations that help them better meet their purpose and better serve their beneficiaries. 

At a recent meeting of heads of fundraising of a number of major charities, there was strong agreement that the top four barriers to innovation were: time; culture of the organisation; senior team mindset; and attitude to risk and failure. These barriers are not unique to charities- most organisations would agree with that list. What most organisations do not have is trustees: trustees can either play a major role in overcoming those barriers, or embody them and stifle innovation.

A trustee's role entails ensuring that the resources that they hold in trust are used to help the charity meet its objects in the most effective way possible: innovation is key to this. If you are in any doubt as to whether a trustee has any role in supporting innovation, have a look at the Good Governance: a Code for the Voluntary and Community Sector.

It exhorts trustees to

• Foster a working environment that supports constructive challenge and welcomes different points of view;
• Consider the risk of missing opportunities;
• Be diverse and challenge institutional assumptions and thinking;
• Remain alert to external factors and consider whether different ways of working may be required to meet opportunities and challenges;
• Consider how it will set the culture of the organisation.

This sends a strong message to trustees that there is more to being a trustee than turning up at meetings having read the papers. It is a proactive role offering great challenges and great rewards, requiring strategic and innovative thinking with a strong awareness of the influence the board has on the the organisation it serves.

So how can Trustees ensure that they are effective in that role and not stifling innovation?

They can: 

• Be innovative as a board in their approach to meetings creating a climate at those meetings that fosters creative thinking and openness to new ideas and ways of working;
• Recognise their influence as leaders and lead for innovation;
• Be open to new ideas from diverse sources;
• Be prepared to support the organsiation in taking strategically wise risks.

You see many such platitudinous lists in blog posts and they often leave me wondering, ‘Well how do you do that?’  So I am not leaving it there. This post will be followed in future weeks by a series of posts on each of the challenges above, relating them to the Code and looking at practical actions trustee boards can take to foster an innovative environment both within and outside their meetings.

For more inovation thoughts visit the NCVO Innovation Pages