As part of our package of member benefits, VONNE’s Gold and Silver Membership+ supporters have the opportunity to submit a guest post for our website.
This blog by James Anderson, Founder and Principal Consultant at Associate Silver members Resolution Ready, shares their experience of working with charities and voluntary organisations across the North East, and offers their insights on how good governance can steady organisations through difficult periods when this is already embedded.
What good governance actually looks like when it matters
Most of the time, governance sits quietly in the background. Trustees meet, papers are approved, decisions are recorded and the organisation gets on with its work. The structures do what they are supposed to do without drawing much attention.
It is often only when something difficult happens that those structures become fully visible, and when people find out whether they are strong enough to hold.
I work with charities and voluntary organisations across the North East on safeguarding, governance and organisational development, and what I notice most often is not a total absence of policy or process. Most charities have those. The difficulty tends to live in the gap between what is written down and what actually happens when a situation is developing quickly, when people are under pressure and when the stakes feel high. Who needs to know? What should have been recorded? When should the trustees step in? These are not simple questions, and when the structures behind them are unclear, decision-making becomes harder and more stressful than it needs to be.
Part of what makes that gap hard to close is that it is not always easy to talk about. In a standard trustee meeting or staff team session, the loudest voices tend to shape the conversation, the difficult questions stay unasked and people leave without having said what they actually think. One of the things I have found genuinely useful in this work is LEGO Serious Play facilitation, which sounds unlikely but works surprisingly well. It gives every person in the room a way to contribute, draws out the thinking that usually stays quiet and helps groups build a shared understanding of where they are and what needs to change. I have used it with trustee boards working through governance challenges, with safeguarding leads trying to think clearly about their role and with teams navigating difficult organisational decisions. It consistently surfaces things that a normal meeting would not.
What tends to help most in those moments is the same thing that helps in calmer ones: clarity. Clarity about roles, about escalation, about how decisions are recorded and explained. Strong governance often shows itself in fairly practical ways, such as a safeguarding lead who understands what their role actually involves, an escalation pathway that staff feel confident using or decisions that are recorded carefully enough that someone else could read the record later and understand what happened and why.
At Resolution Ready, we support charities through independent safeguarding reviews and policy health checks, governance consultancy, bespoke training and facilitation, including LEGO Serious Play sessions for boards and teams. The first conversation is always free.
Across the voluntary sector right now, demand is rising, resources are tight and scrutiny of safeguarding and decision-making has increased. Governance can feel like another layer of expectation on top of organisations that are already doing a lot. But when it is working well, it does the opposite of adding burden. It creates the steadiness that allows organisations to focus on the people they exist to serve, and to handle difficulty when it arrives without being thrown off course.
James Anderson is principal consultant at Resolution Ready, working with children's services, charities and voluntary organisations across England. Visit www.resolutionready.org.uk to find out more about their work, or get in touch at office@resolutionready.org.uk.