Governance dilemmas and how to avoid them

Anyone working with think tanks would recognise this situation: very competent researchers, communicators and directors struggling to take their organisations in the direction that they think, and know, is best for them. Their plans are well thought and researched. They have discussed their ideas with their peers and with people with more experience. They have read books and followed discussions on the subject just to make sure they have covered all the bases.

Still, change is something they can only dream of.

It is all down to governance -or the lack of it.

Before this blog post is taken as a general critique of all think tanks with complex governance arrangements and to all managers let me say this: most think tanks, many successful ones, have developed governance arrangements that, while not ideal now or for the future, have worked for them in the past. They have allowed them to deal with unfriendly legislation, hyper-inflation, political repression, lack of funding, etc. Some of these arrangements are borderline legal and would be the subject of study of any MBA in the world. So before we go about ‘telling them what to do’ we should be careful to understand that whatever we think of them they have worked so far and are likely to have characteristics of great value.

The same goes for the many competent and hard working thinktankers in management positions; the ones who by nature or nurture manage to pull it often at a high personal cost.

When thinking of governance and management, there are a number of issues that could be considered, avoided, and carried out. This blog post draws from several conversations with think tank directors and staff, funders, and my own experience. It is an attempt to start a conversation about the issue of governance and it is therefore, at times, somewhat controversial. I hope it will elicit a reaction and that you will want to share your own expertise and experience with us. Do email me if you would like to.

Some governance challenges considerations

Origin: Many challenges related to governance arrangements (including management) can be found in the origins of the think tanks themselves. I think that, for instance, academic and NGO think tanks are overly -participatory and their governance arrangements are plagued by committees, boards, councils, and other group decision making spaces of that sort. Donor led think tanks on the other hand are project driven and full of bureaucratic nonsense and logframes that turn the organisation into projects.

Skills: Just as one would expect a successful company to be managed by good managers we should expect a successful think tank to be managed by good managers, too. I doubt that a prerequisite to be the CEO of IKEA is to be an experienced carpenter; or that Shell would dismiss anyone who has not worked in an oil rig. Management, like research is a skill and demands certain competencies that can be learned (although some people are more ‘natural’ than others). But Shell or IKEA managers will not succeed if they do not understand what is it that their companies do. Well, a key challenge think tanks face in developing and managing the right governance arrangements is that the best managers out there do not tend to think of think tanks when they are looking for work. Or, to put it the other way , people who work for think tanks do not tend to be the best managers.

Worst still, the people working in the non-research roles of think tanks do not tend to be among the best in their industries (unless the think tank in question is Heritage or Brookings or some think tanks in Aid-dependent countries where salaries in the NGO sector are extremely high). In my experience most think tanks do not have finance teams; they have accounting teams. Finance teams would be managing large endowments for the organisation, making long term and complex strategic decisions, and developing the right financial systems and processes necessary for managing a complex set of programmes and projects. But this simple labelling mishap prevents them from finding the right staff for a crucially important task in any organisation. Human resources staff are often equally under-qualified. If the think tanks even have human resources staff, then they will be likely to be people who started out in another position within the organisation, who are working on it part-time or who just could not cut it in the corporate world. Etcetera.

I would say the same about communications but I think that things have started to change and so think tanks do have better options in this case than in others.

Often the problem lies in the assumption that think tanks, being charities, need volunteers; and that a volunteer is a gift that one cannot complain about. But think tanks, and charities, as I will argue below, are not simple organisations that can be managed by well-meaning amateurs alone. This is why the best directors and think tanks leaders spend quite a lot of their time learning about think tanks, networking with their peers, seeking professional advice from friends in industry or in other professions, etc.

Complex nature: Flying in the face of all logic, think tanks are enterprises that are set to lose money right from the start. In principle, they do not sell anything and even try to give it away for free -and to as many people as they can. Only then, after they have given their advice for free, do they try to get people to pay for what they ’ve already done or to provide a bit more advice. It makes no sense.

Think tanks trade on high quality research for which they need the best researchers out there; but cannot afford to pay them whatever it is that they could be earning in the private sector. Somehow they must offer them a better deal even though that is nigh impossible. And in their desperation to stay afloat they manage different business models simultaneously : grants, contracts, partnerships, sponsorships, volunteerism, etc.

Managing a think tank is not easier than managing a business. Not because a think tank has a smaller turnover than most companies does it need to worry less about management. If anything, their very nature demands greater innovation and expertise than other more straight forward industries.

Never enough money for non-research activities: Funders are quite happy to pay for research outputs but not so much for all the other stuff that has to happen for the research to be done. So think tanks often come up with quite amazing ways of raising the money they need to pay for some of the central posts they need. The problem is that these approaches are never really designed to deliver good governance and management; rather they are about doing the research now and dealing with management later. Alway s kicking the problem into the future.

Possible governance minefields and some ideas on how to deal with them

Too much participation: Many think tanks, particularly those with academic and NGO origins (and quite a few in Latin America and in the European international development scene) are, in my view, burdened by too much participation. Their governance arrangements are full of very top-heavy boards, councils, advisory bodies and consultation or decision making committees in charge of all sorts of decisions all the way down to the day to day running of the office.

As a consequence, decisions are hard to make, communication between these bodies is difficult, and responsibility is unclear. In a way , the committee approach works well for the less skilled managers (and researchers with management responsibilities) who can hide behind the group and avoid making difficult choices themselves. HR managers can always defer to the management committee decisions about staff incentives; heads of ‘finance’ can let others share the blame on the sometimes risky choices involved with handling the organisation’s funds; and directors themselves can share the blame for poor leadership with their ‘hands-on’ boards and senior management teams.

But too much participation creates another problem. It demands an awful lot of record keeping and internal communications that few think tanks can manage with ease and distracts from other more important activities. Meetings need to be recorded or notes need to be taken. These need to be edited and shared (upwards, sideways, and downwards). Decisions need to be made by one or more means and often these take more than one meeting and several informal ones.

All of this makes the governance arrangement unclear to the staff who may not know who is making what decision. Where does the buck stop? Whose heads should roll?

Rather than suggesting that these bodies are dismantled and that think tanks move to a top down authoritarian or corporate model overnight I would start by:

• Clarifying and assigning key roles and responsibilities on core functions like HR, finance or accounting, office management, logistics or operations, research, communications, etc. to individuals who will be ultimately responsible for the decisions made; and whose heads must roll if it comes to that;
• Choosing or appointing a chair for each group or board or committee who will be ultimately responsible for the decisions made and for communicating with the other groups; and
• Limiting what is shared with others and what decisions are made by committee; most things can and should be decided by the leadership.

Governance by organogram: I like diagrams; they help me think. And when I am studying a think tank I try to draw their organogram based on what the staff themselves tell me. Interestingly , more often than not I get conflicting versions, but what is most telling is that when I ask managers to describe their governance they tend to bring out the organogram. “Here it is,” they seem to be saying.

Connecting circles with letters in them to other circles with letters with solid or dotted lines does not automatically mean that there is a working relationship between the real life circles. Linking the ‘Board’ with the ‘Director’ and putting the ‘Director’ within a bigger circle labelled ‘Senior Management’ does not mean that somehow the Board and the Senior Management are in fact connected or that the Director is an active participant of the Senior Management team whose members all work together in harmony.

Coming up with fancy sounding solutions such as ‘Matrix structure’ does not make it better, either: cross cutting issues are not naturally occurring and drawing a box labelled ‘Gender’ or ‘Communication’ across the bottom of all the policy programmes won’t bring them to life. The Gender component will have to be managed; someone needs to be responsible for it. And Communications will not just happen; someone will have to be in charge.

Try a simple exercise:

• Get your staff to describe how they see the organisation being structured and how they think it should;
• Then try to find the simplest possible version;
• Never leave an area or theme or task un(wo)manned; and
• Ensure that where you have lines connecting circles the people represented are really working together (this is easy to tell -no fancy indicators needed to know if people get along and work together).

Senior researchers and not senior managers: Many think tanks are sleepwalking into a management nightmare (if they are not there already ). As their bright young minds progress in their careers they are awarded greater internal responsibilities. They go, for example, from being research officers to research fellows, to programme leaders, to senior programme leaders, etc. There is an expectation that managing staff, budgets and projects must come with seniority; that, as one becomes a better researcher, one must also be learning how to be a better manager (or that management is so below a researcher’s other skills that anyone could do it).

The consequence is that fantastic researchers turn into terrible managers. Some deal with this rather well and quickly learn to delegate certain responsibilities, train their staff to take on some management tasks, and even seek outside help. But many others, and I have come across them too often, are unable to handle the additional pressure and either turn against themselves or their staff. Poor management leads, inevitably , to poor research. Poorly managed staff do not deliver on time, cannot learn from their mistakes, do not respect their work, eventually burn-out.

And this can only make things more difficult for the managers themselves who, unable to deal with the additional pressure, just get worse at managing; and the cycle goes on and on.

I’ve come across some notable exceptions in the past. David Booth for example took a step to the side and became a senior researcher giving way to a younger programme manager. Few senior researchers are comfortable with this arrangement. But it worked. It gave David the time and opportunity to develop a long term research programme that paid off for the team.

Just as in most other organisations think tanks tend to promote people into job before they have the skills to deliver them properly. I struggled as a programme manager quite simply because I did not know what I was supposed to do. I tried learning on the job and sought help from people inside and outside the organisation, and although I think I had some wins, in the end I could not really take it much longer.

Some tips:

• Identify future managers and leaders among your staff;
• Invest in them by giving them the opportunity to manage projects, work with several researchers and team, and even sending them to proper management courses and, why not, MBAs;
• Make the management path attractive to pull in some of the best (and not just those who may feel they won’t be able to ‘cut it’ as researchers); and
• Never promote without good training, some practice (e.g. supervised on the job learning), and assigning a responsible mentor.

More templates and tools are not the solution (even if they are useful); better managers are: The solution is not in the introduction of project management process, templates or tools. Poor managers (and people who do not like to manage and who, let’s be honest, are much more useful focusing on their research) do not respond well to templates and tools. And if they do, if they take to them and embrace them, then they are more likely to use them to avoid rather than to manage more. It is much easier to fill in a staff performance review table than to talk to your staff and work with them. If you do the former, the template may serve a useful purpose; but it does not work the other way around.

There is no way of avoiding this: think tanks need better managers. They could come out of the research cadre or from an entirely different one; but they need to be supported and promoted in the same way that the bright research minds are.

And researchers have to recognise that it is in their best interests to defer some decisions to people whose job is to create the space and the conditions for them to excel at their own jobs.

Solutions?

• Get better managers -HR professionals, accountants, etc.;
• If you can’t, then buy the services of companies who specialise in these things -do not try to do it yourselves (you would not try to fix the electrics in your house if you did not know about it; this is the same. The chances are you’ll get a bad shock if you do); and
• Budget for management time; it will not happen if you do not earmark time for it.

“Bite as much as you can and chew like crazy”: The first time I heard this I thought it was quite a clever strategy. Then I saw the consequences of this way of working and changed my mind (or almost lost my mind). Faced with the usual challenge of not having enough funds to cover central costs think tanks sometimes resolve to getting more work (the growth strategy ) to make a bigger profit out of lots of small margins with which to pay for central services (namely management; including management day s for researchers). The problem, of course, is that more work means more management. More projects, more staff, more consultants, more invoices, more travel, more risks, more decisions, etc. all add up to more management days.

And so inevitably, quality suffers, staff work more and more for smaller margins eventually feeling there is no light at the end of the tunnel, and there is never enough to pay for top rate management support and leadership that the think that would need to get out of that cycle.

• Do less: Doing more might be the worst thing that a think tank with weak governance and management arrangements should do. If anything, while they get their governance together they should commit themselves to doing less. Fewer things, done better;
• Establish a clear, robust, and (almost) non-negotiable process to choose projects that keeps management pressures under control;
• Review your incentives structure (including how your thin tank assigns financial targets across the staff to reduce the need to chew like crazy ).

The “no firing” culture: An important consequence of the bite and chew culture and the tyranny of participation is that people do not leave and the ones that should hardly ever get fired. Political think tanks tend to have a rather healthy employment arrangement. Staff do not get paid much but they are not expected to stay too long either. The think tank is there to help launch them and their ideas. It is a vehicle, a platform. It grows and shrinks depending on the political landscape (it tends to grow in opposition and shrink in government). Donor funded think tanks, with donors’ ever increasing budgets, tend to grow and grow and grow.

And when decisions are made by committees it is almost impossible to fire anyone. Everyone is somebody ’s peer and few people have, or are given, control. I am not advocating for think tanks to irresponsibly lay off staff, but they have to build into their governance and management arrangements the necessary procedures to, quickly and fairly , make important staffing choices. And staff should be ready for them. It saves everyone time and anguish.

Some options available to think tanks may include:

• Eliminating long term contracts for most new staff and gradually moving the rest into these more flexible ones;
• Developing clear processes by which the organisation’s senior management will make strategic choices about the fate of programmes and projects so that, if necessary , staff can be laid off in an orderly and fair manner;
• Investing in a HR department that pays attention to the long and short term development of the staff force to manage ‘hiring and firing’ in a fair manner;
• Making senior level staff’s performance appraisals more transparent; and
• Putting the organisation and its mission above anyone’s personal interests.

Boards that do not get it: Boards of think tanks hardly ever really ‘get it’. Directors sometimes complain that their board members do not really understand what a think tank is; and board members are not entirely sure what is it that is expected from them. More than once I’ve had conversations with both about training board members on ‘what is a think tank?’ and ‘how to be on the board of a think tank?’

Since the boards are ultimately responsible for the think tanks they must get it. They must understand what the organisation is about and must have the skills that the organisation needs.

But not all boards are equal. Some are made up of the researchers themselves arranged as a council; and the chances are that these boards lack the necessary management capacities to make them work as boards. Some are simply advisory boards made up of highly respected national and foreign academics; and they are unlikely to know or have the time or interest to deal with ‘boring admin’. Then others are made up of the funders or political/policy people (often in donor/government led think tanks); and the chances here are that the focus will be more on controlling ideas rather than encouraging innovation.

The best boards would be those that combine:

• Content/issue knowledge: academics;
• Political and policy knowledge: former (ideally but not necessarily ) politicians and policymakers;
• Think tank knowledge: people with experience participating in think tanks’ boards or leading or working for think tanks; and
• Central roles knowledge: people with management, financial, communications, human resources, logistics, technological, etc. knowledge and expertise to help the think tanks with all those areas that are crucial for their functioning but that is so hard to deal with on their own

Founders (and senior managers) that won’t leave: When the director of research of a relatively young think tank announced her departure last year I jokingly told her boss, the director, that they would now not be able to get rid of him. I say jokingly because we had talked about this before. When should the founder let go and pass the think tank to the next generation? Nicolas Ducoté talked about it at length in an interview for onthinktanks.org and I reposted an interesting piece on the subject of founder failure. In a visit to Serbia last year I came across a perfect example of how the right timing can have lasting effects on the fate of a think tank. The Belgrade Centre for Security Studies was able to reinvent itself when it needed to thanks to the vision and courage of its founders to pass the post to a new generation of researchers at the right time. But other centres were not so lucky and one director even told me: “I’ve run out of ideas”.

The solution is surprisingly simple and it should be led by the think tanks’ boards as the ultimate caretakers of the organisations:

• Establish clear and public guidelines about the permanence of senior staff in their posts as well as public discussions about the senior leadership should be expected of all think tanks (they are, after all, public organisations) because they avoid the inevitable running out of ideas that dictators or juntas lead to.

Directors that want to do everything: This reminds me of Bugs Bunny playing baseball alone: pitching, batting, running to first, playing in the outfield, etc. Some directors, specially , founding directors may feel the need to do and be involved in everything. They think that if they want something done right then they have to do it themselves. Unfortunately this can have the effect of crowding out initiative and, given that one person cannot be good at everything, not much will be done properly .

Directors need to:

• Delegate ultimate responsibility to their boards: including the responsibility to fire them;
• Hire professionals to the right jobs and delegating to them;
• Learn how to ask for things and give orders: most of the time the problem lies in not knowing how to ask for things and communicating intentions poorly . We assume that they know what is in our heads but if we do not share it, how could they ? and
• Ask their boards for help if they cannot cope with this.

Absentee directors: Either because they are too tired and out of ideas, or because they never really wanted the job but it was their turn to take it, or because they are simply not that kind of person, think tank directors that are not seen might as well not be there. Being seen is not just about being on the news or walking through the office all the time.

Good governance demands that we feel that there is someone in charge of things; someone in the driving seat. Most of the time this translates into small but well thought and sensible actions that improve things for the think tank. I have come across several low profile directors who are well known and respected by their staff and their audiences; as well as highly visible ones who come across as absentees.

Being there could involve:

• Developing a brand or a name on a key policy issue and publishing via a blog, a newspaper column or other flexible and accessible channel;
• Approaching staff on a regular basis and attempting to address some of their concerns;
• Championing the work of the think tank’s staff but not just that if their favourites; and
• Being good at their job: there is no substitute for this, really.

Lack of respect: An important purpose of good governance is to develop the conditions for the staff to respect those they work with and, most importantly , those that make the kind of decisions that will affect their daily work. When, at a think tank I was working at, senior management came up with a massive organisational change project that would affect how researchers managed their time and projects, accessed information, shared information, etc. staff responded with scepticism. And this scepticism was largely based on 1 ) the general impression that senior management had good intentions but not the skills to pull it off, and 2) an overall lack of clarity about what was the purpose of the reform.

The entire enterprise seemed a bit too much for them and so staff that would have otherwise not have been bothered with ‘admin’ started to look into the project. They challenged everything: the rationale for it, the assumptions of cost and benefit, the choice of leaders, the choice of solutions and contractors, etc. It was a self-fulfilling prophesy : everyone expected it to fail and since everyone’s buy -in was necessary for its success… well.

If the leadership had come along with the proposal after a few big wins or if the general impression of the centre’s leaders had been more favourable then the reaction might have been different. But rather than put the blame on their poor management or organisational competencies I think it would be fairer to argue that poor communications play ed a critical role in the outcome of this project. A complex governance structure made up of an ever increasing staff body, countless groups and committees to discuss everything form the Christmas party to the new pension plan and the think tank’s logo, and constant reorganisation of job titles and of the organisation’s structure made it almost impossible to really get to grips with all that was going on. And confusion, especially among researchers, can led to scepticism and suspicion.

To avoid this situation leaders and managers should:

• Be good at their job: there is no substitute for this, really;
• Focus on getting the most appropriate governance arrangement first and then launch their reforms. A complex, confusing, and inefficient governance arrangement will make decision making difficult, communication messy , and implementation impossible;
• Show this by making good and sensible decisions quickly, demonstrating knowledge of the think tank and its staff, giving clear orders when delegating tasks but never giving up ultimate responsibility, and being seen by their staff;
• Think, then think again, check with others who may know more than they do, and then, when they have a vision and a plan, get on with it: confidence breeds confidence;
• Communicate their vision and plans clearly and constantly: if staff are not clear where change is taking them they will react with suspicion and will be unsupportive;
• Involve staff during only as much as is necessary: too much consultation suggests that they may not know what do to; and
• Build in monitoring and evaluation of the process and do not be afraid to decommission their own projects: but only when absolutely necessary.

Some additional ideas

So besides making sure that the boards have the right skills, that the governance structure is simple and clear for all to understand, that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined across the organisation, that the right staff is hired instead to trying to patch things up with tools and templates, and other possible solutions, what else can think tanks do?

Hire outside your community: I know many young y et experienced managers and communicators who would jump at the opportunity to spend some time working for a think tank. Many have been working in a developed country think tank or have finished an MBA and are still wondering what to do next. Many are on their way back to their countries of origin or are already there taking a break from work while they enjoy their latest bonus and before they start searching for work.

Think tanks too often hire too close to home. They do not advertise and if they do they probably only do it on their websites or using their usual networks. Sometimes they go beyond their borders but not outside the international development community.

Think tanks could also seek expert advice from corporations willing to send their staff to do some pro-bono work. Law firms do this regularly so there is no reason why other types of companies wouldn’t.

Build in flexibility: Networks are not flexible just because we call them ‘networks’. They need to be flexible by design (intended or unintended). Getting buy -in from a think tank’s staff at all levels is a good thing and committees (or other types of groups) can be very useful for this. But they cannot be the end and be all.

To begin with, members must never assume permanence. Senior managers ought to have clearly defined (and even public) career paths that allow the think tanks to renew their leadership. In more participatory think tanks, researchers should accept moving sideways and downwards every once in a while.

Management itself needs to give staff the opportunity to move across research and policy themes, work with researchers from different teams, and try -out several roles as they define their own career paths.

Finally, think tanks should have clear plans to hire and fire staff to avoid unfair situations or delaying strategic investments and decommissions.

Talk to your funders: In my experience think tanks and their funders rarely ever have the kind of honest and open conversations they need to have. Even some of the strongest think tanks I know approach their funders with their heads down, making marginal and piecemeal suggestions, and accept whatever demand is forced upon them.

They all complain that the funding conditions do not help them to plan ahead, that multiple reporting demands distract them from getting on with the work, that unrealistic impact demands keep them from carrying out innovative and important research, etc.

More often than not think tanks just get on with things; accept the money and try to do whatever they can until the next set of demands come along.

But the solution has to be different. Think tanks need to document how their funding affects their capacity to undertake their work and fulfil their missions; develop alternative approaches or arrangements; and put them forward to their funders. As Hans Gutbrod has said, the think tank community is rather large and better connected than ever. Speaking out ought not be a lonely affair.