This webinar will bust some of the myths and assumptions that keep us locked into old ways of working, and offer six ways to shift how we think about and do governance work. You will leave this session with a number of practical tools and tactics to spark reimagining governance in your organization.

All registered participants will receive a recording, and a curated list of resources within one week of the event. If you have any questions about the event, please email info@theonn.ca.

Speakers

• Erin Kang (they/she) – Director of Network Engagement, 91ÊÓÆ” Nonprofit Network
• Linda Mollenhauer (she/her) – Chair, Ignite NPS

What is governance as shared leadership?

This is often how we understand governance decision-making:

The board is the locus of control. In fact, the words ‘the board’ and ‘governance’ are used interchangeably even though broader stakeholders like the staff leadership team, communities served, and volunteers often provide input into governance decisions. Their input may include everything from feedback to recommendations – but the board ultimately makes governance decisions. 

It’s also interesting to note that in many organizations the board does operational work alongside its governance work. This adds to the confusion about roles of governance.   

Now let’s look at a shared governance approach:

In this diagram, the centre point is the role governance plays in the organization – such as generating impacts – and the governance functions that must be performed. Everything else flows from these. The board still plays a critical role, but governance leadership is more broadly distributed, and decisions are made in a collaborative way. It feels more like interlocking nodes that form a system of governance.

Though these diagrams may oversimplify, they offer a good starting place for conversations. For example – does your governance approach look more like one of the diagrams or is it a hybrid? Why does it look that way?

Three reasons it’s critical to focus on shared governance leadership

1. Shared governance helps address the increased complexity of governance. 

It’s tough for nonprofit boards to fulfill all the responsibilities of governance, which have become increasingly complex. While board members are generous with their volunteer time, it’s limited and the expectations placed on them are high. When organizations share responsibilities more broadly, it reduces the board’s burden, and leverages the talents, experience, skills, and knowledge of the organization’s full ecosystem..   

2. Shared governance deepens equity and broadens decision-making. 

There’s an urgency to deepen equity in decision-making, including widening the diversity of perspectives, and challenging some of the traditional ideas of who does governance work. Questioning who should and could share in decision-making, and making changes based on that, helps deepen equity. 

3. Shared governance helps create more clarity. 

Most organizations already share their  governance –  to some degree – but it’s not always done with clarity.  For example, collaborations are growing, which means more governance decisions are made outside the single organization’s board room, like setting collective priorities. Yet many organizations don’t approach it with intentionality – like figuring out how to align conflicting directions — or manage complex risk and confusing accountabilities. 

Clarity about shared governance can also be helpful for the partnership between the board and staff leadership. It’s often said that the board does governance and the staff leadership supports and implements it. But this simplistic distinction doesn’t begin to capture the complexity of the relationship. It also doesn’t acknowledge that staff leadership is actually doing a lot of governance work, not just supporting board decision-making. 

Many organizations have governance committees, advisories and task groups that include non-board members. There’s often a Terms of Reference describing the intent and other expectations. But it is uncommon for underlying power dynamics to be addressed. For example, there may be clarity on paper about the authority these groups have to take action, but less about what power the board is prepared to give up. 

The reality is that sharing governance responsibilities and decision-making has some challenges – along with benefits.

Maximizing benefits of shared leadership while mitigating challenges

We’ve identified three key strategies to maximize the benefits of shared governance leadership while mitigating the challenges:  

• Recruit the leaders with the right skills, personal attributes, values and mindsets to make it work.
• Create an enabling culture. 
• Adopt a purpose driven approach.

Dive deeper into each of these in our accompanying .

It’s worth noting that trust is clearly at the heart of successful shared governance, which is hard to build and easy to lose. But if you adopt these three strategies, then trust is likely to follow. The diagram below shows an example of how your organization can adopt a purpose-driven approach. You’ll find it in the tool, .

Get started on governance as shared leadership now

It’s more important than ever to explore how governance can be shared, taking advantage of the benefits and mitigating the challenges. Get started right now by taking one (or all!) of the following actions: 

• Share this blog with your leadership and governance teams and have a conversation about what questions or insights spark for you.
• Check out the Board Essentials resource, and the accompanying tool , to gain confidence you’re doing what you need to do before exploring sharing governance work.
• Learn more about shared decision-making in the resource, Shared Decision-Making for Nonprofit Governance.
• Dive deeper into governance work by exploring the Differentiating governance responsibilities and decisions resource, and then really dive in by experimenting with the tool. 

Governance as shared leadership isn’t just about tactics and engagement strategies – it’s about a mindset and way of working that’s premised on the belief that you can accomplish so much more through a collaborative, networked governance system.

Download transcript.

Three key takeaways about governance culture:

1. Governance culture is a complex, often invisible force that has a big impact on how governance is done. 

Governance culture speaks to the values, mindsets, and ways of interaction of those who do governance work, such as the board, executive director, senior leadership, and any others participating in governance decision-making. 

Governance culture is a combination of:

• Mindsets – e.g. attitudes, perspectives, ways of thinking/behaving, worldviews
• Values – e.g. the core beliefs valued by the organization and the people within the organization 
• Ways of interaction – e.g. how people act together, towards, or with others; norms and habits

Governance culture can also include unique habits and norms that have formed over periods of time or within certain groups of people, becoming ‘normalized’ into a culture.

It impacts the actions, decisions, rules, and power dynamics that influence governance work. This manifests, for example, in who is consulted in decision-making, what types of knowledge and opinions are valued, the degree of risk tolerance, and how leadership is expressed and conferred. It comes out in questions of, How do we value feedback? Whose opinions and what kinds of types of knowledge are being valued by governance leaders? These things are greatly influenced by the mindsets, the values, the deep seated perspectives that people hold – often without realizing that they’re there. 

2. Many nonprofits don’t address governance culture intentionally, but doing so can open doors to governance innovation. 

Governance culture is highly prevalent but often not explored or named intentionally. Many organizations just assume organizational culture and governance culture merge; but they are different. Organizational culture typically focuses on the organization’s relationship to the community, to human resource and ethical principles, and links to the organization’s vision. It doesn’t focus on the conscious or unconscious mindsets, values and perspectives of those who are fulfilling governance, including what’s driving decisions and how governance structures and processes are created. As a result, there can be misalignments and misunderstandings. 

If organizations are more intentional about their governance culture it opens up opportunities for innovation. For example, it causes governance leaders to determine what processes, structures and practices align with their intended culture, rather than just adopt generic ones. It causes deeper reflection that goes beyond just diversifying the board, to challenging notions of power and privilege and unpacking how to create truly equitable practices. 

3. Your nonprofit can start digging into this work right away, and the upcoming Reimagining Governance Lab will support you! 

Reflections about governance culture can happen during strategic planning sessions, be folded into regular check-ins and meetings, or be a well-resourced and longer-term activity that happens over months. This journey will look different for every nonprofit. 

A key starting place is to build trust and create the right environment for navigating governance culture together, enabling the team to surface insights. The goal is not to create a perfect culture, because that doesn’t exist. Think about the values that you feel should drive your governance, and then reflect on the degree of alignment between those and the personal values, perspectives, and mindsets of individual governance leaders. Then, reflect on what everything means, examining the opportunities and challenges of your current circumstances. 

For instance, if everyone is very aligned in values and mindsets, this could make governance work easier because there is a high level of agreement. However, if this goes on unexamined or without intentionality, it could prevent the group from seeing gaps, understanding barriers to their programs or services, and get stuck in ‘groupthink’ over the years. 

A more intentional governance culture focuses on the relationships and human dynamics that drive your governance. It also means that nonprofit organizations are more responsive to the evolving environment, which ultimately enables them to better serve communities. 

The Reimagining Governance Lab, a virtual space for people to explore innovative approaches to governance, will be sharing a tool that helps organizations to explore and reflect on their governance culture.  to stay connected and receive updates on the launch of the Lab! 

By Erin Kang and Linda Mollenhauer

This vlog is the second in a three-part series that will highlight learnings from ONN’s Reimagining Governance, a collaborative initiative with Ignite NPS. Following this series, we will be launching a virtual space for people to explore innovative approaches to governance in the nonprofit sector.

A big thing that often gets in the way of embarking on change work – like reimagining how nonprofit organizations think about and do governance – is the sheer messiness of it all. Discomfort, or even dread, is common when we confront change or try something new. Add in a sense of ambiguity about how things may unfold, along with the unpredictable and complex environments that nonprofits operate in, and it’s enough to make you want to double-down on the safety of the status quo. After all, it’s so much easier not to change.

Yet the messiness, discomfort, and ambiguity are the magic sauce that enables innovative thinking to happen. So how can your organization bring about governance innovation, and why should you do it? 

Reimagining Governance has sparked innovation in governance by provoking a shift in how it’s thought about and done. There is a real opportunity to get away from fixing immediate problems, and align governance better with our current realities. When we dove into a series of Learning Labs, working alongside a variety of nonprofit organizations and their boards to experiment and co-create our processes and tools, it really challenged us to lean into the discomfort that comes from creating something new. It also surfaced some key conditions for innovation to thrive. 

Here’s what we learned together: 

1. Create a clear, shared understanding of what you mean by ‘innovation’

‘Innovation’ is one of those words that is so overused, that its meaning has become flattened and can sometimes serve as a barrier to change. There is no single definition of innovation that will resonate with everyone, but each organization can shape it to align it with their unique circumstances. 

Innovation could look like: 

• A small shift which makes a big difference (e.g. moving away from having formal, fixed governance committees and trying more agile ways to convene people around specific tasks, like strategic visioning); 
• Incremental changes over time that shift power dynamics and accountabilities (e.g. being intentional about articulating the values that influence governance work, which results in new approaches to how decisions are made);
• Full shake-up or transformation of how governance work is done in the organization (e.g. shifting from a more rigid, hierarchical structure towards a broader network of governance decision-makers). 

2. Normalize messiness as a key ingredient to change-work

The conditions for innovation actually need messiness to prompt the breakthroughs and shifts in thinking that spark new ideas, causing us to grow, stretch, and dream bigger. Innovation work calls on us to reflect on and name what we think, and how we approach relationships and decision-making. That’s going to get messy! 

Organizations that participated in our Learning Labs were confronted with lots of messiness – there were many times when people threw up their arms asking, “Where are we going with this?” There was a hunger to return to the comfort zone of tactics and action steps. But people persevered. At a final session for their team, one person remarked, “[This] changed my thinking. I’m a tangible thinker, so this has been uncomfortable for me but I am a better person and hopefully a better chair.”  

Some things that can help with navigating the messiness: 

• Take the time to get a shared sense of the outcomes you want to achieve – the purpose and broad direction. This will become the guiding star for the board and management team throughout your journey. Avoid getting into the “how you’ll do it,” until you’ve decided why you’re doing it. 
• Allocate enough time in your journey to reflect, challenge, debate, and deepen understanding. Finding new ways of doing governance work can’t be rushed, and it needs collective ownership to be sustainable. People will have different relationships with the messiness of innovation. It can be helpful for a small group of people who are more comfortable with ambiguity and chaos to help champion the upfront work, while looping the rest of the team in along the way. 
• If the majority of people feel high levels of discomfort in engaging with this work, it may be time to pause and think about team readiness. For example, it can be helpful to invest in trust and relationship-building by providing more information and allowing for dialogue before embarking on this work. 

3. Let go of old habits and deeply held assumptions about governance

When we’re surrounded by what we already know, we feel safe. But staying safe doesn’t lead to new ideas or ways of working. , “So many of the things that we do are done a certain way because that’s just how someone else told us things should be done.” 

It’s important to challenge the status quo by uncovering the assumptions, beliefs, or mindsets that fuel our perspectives of how governance must or should be done. This requires an ongoing practice of asking brave questions, examining where our beliefs come from, and consistent reframing so you don’t just keep arriving at the same kinds of solutions. Once that’s done, it’s important to practice letting go of the assumptions and habits that aren’t true or don’t make sense anymore. Intentionally naming and reframing things like this allowed teams to discover opportunities that they may not have if they simply stayed the course. 

Here are some examples of assumptions and habits that the Learning Lab organizations let go of and, reframed:

Example 1: An organization had the habit of connecting with its stakeholders through a fixed, formal structure that had been around for decades. By examining their unique circumstances and context, they realized that the landscape has significantly changed; they serve different communities and stakeholders with different needs. This realization prompted a shift in thinking that allowed the organization to think about engaging diverse stakeholders in a more timely and agile way. For example, instead of formal committees, creating opportunities to form around specific issues (like strategic visioning) and then disperse.

Example 2: There was a perception that the board has to do all the work of governance. But board members were feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work, particularly as volunteers. By reframing that assumption, they started thinking about the board as the ‘home’ of governance as it relates to its legal regulatory responsibilities, but the ‘host’ of other governance functions that could be delegated and shared with other key stakeholders. 

Example 3: An organization’s board was comprised of specific stakeholder groups, which was thought to be the best way to represent their voices in governance. However, it was noted that this approach was tokenistic and made it challenging to recruit for the skills, knowledge, mindsets, and lived experiences that their board work demanded. By re-focusing their board recruitment on attaining those key characteristics, it opened up space to explore creating different engagement strategies to give meaningful voice to the diversity of their stakeholders, based on their unique interests. 

4. Create the conditions that work best for your organization 

Engaging in deep conversations around complex and intangible topics is challenging enough without the additional difficulties of a global pandemic. But there are never “perfect conditions”, and it could be argued that an environment of rapid change and adaptation is actually ripe for innovation in governance. Why wait?

Here are some things we learned about creating conditions for success:.

• People need permission to have open, honest, challenging conversations and to experiment, which requires an environment of trust. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall back into group-think or what is “tried and true”. 
• Get away from your normal routines and seek out spaces and practices that spark inspiration. For example, use collaborative whiteboard tools to brainstorm and draw together, or ask questions like “Why do we think that?” or “What could be possible if we did things this way?”.
• Beware of falling into the trap of “we’re broken and need fixing”. Reimagining governance is exciting because it’s about grabbing hold of the opportunity to create better ways of doing governance. 
• Timing is key. If your organization is facing some crisis or choppy waters, you probably don’t have the capacity to take risks. 

Carrying the lessons forward 

The Learning Labs gifted us with a key affirmation: there is a tremendous opportunity and space to innovate how governance work is done. What could be possible for our collective futures if we did reimagine governance? What’s at stake if we don’t? In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing two more blog posts that dive deeper into some of the lessons we shared here, and highlighting some stories from inside the Learning Labs. 

Reimagining governance is important and timely work. Nonprofits are operating in increasingly complex environments, navigating a HR crisis, and deeply questioning how to go beyond diversity and inclusion to meaningfully ground governance work in equity and anti-oppression. This makes the questions of who makes decisions, how decisions are made, and who is ultimately accountable even more critical to examine – and exciting to reimagine.

Explore related reports and resources:  

• Map your governance through a wider lens of a complex system. This framework will help you to better understand all the influencers that shape your governance design and to visualize each of the components of governance so they can be put back together creatively.
• Board Essentials kick-starts a conversation about how to share governance decision-making more broadly, enabling more voices to be included. It identifies the responsibilities that must be met by the board based on the legal and regulatory requirements so there is a clearer understanding about what can be shared or delegated, and what can be done by others.
• Impacts on Governance Design is new research describing eleven broad trends and forces in the nonprofit sector and how they converge to create six critical impacts on governance design. This resource can be used to identify how your governance design has been, or could be, shaped by these impacts.  
• Check out our past blog post, Equity, Power, and the Future of the Nonprofit Sector
• Learn more about the initiative by visiting our webpage
• Stay in the loop by joining our

By Erin Kang and Linda Mollenhauer

This blog post is the first in a three-part series that will highlight learnings from ONN’s Reimagining Governance, a collaborative initiative with Ignite NPS. Following this series, we will be launching a virtual space for people to explore innovative approaches to governance in the nonprofit sector. Stay connected and receive updates by . 

Show Contributors

Recently Vu Le, a leader in the sector and the face behind the popular blog Nonprofit AF, to nonprofits and charities: Why do we keep doing things the way we do? 

As Vu notes, the spotlight shouldn’t necessarily be on individual board members, many of whom are doing their best and actively contributing to the organization. Rather, it’s the system and the design of governance that should be reimagined. As ongoing conversations about racial justice remind us, it is simply not enough to focus on the symptoms of an issue: solutions must hone in on the root of the problem.

The root issue of nonprofit governance is its design. We have been thinking about the design of governance so narrowly. Typically, governance is equated with the board of directors and there is a false line in the sand between governance and management. On the ground though, we know that’s not how it really works. 

Though there are many examples of strong boards, the reliance on a model that revolves around the functionality of just one structure (the board) means it’s vulnerable to a variety of factors. For instance, folks in the sector trade stories of good governance going sideways due to single factors like a new board chair coming in. One or two factors should not derail the effectiveness of a system. Considering that governance is a system with many structures, players, influences, and processes not only consisting of the board could result in more resilient governance systems.

The current design of governance emphasizes just one aspect of governance: the performance of the board. Thus, there are a variety of very important programs and courses that work to nurture and support the capacity of the board to do its work well. 

However, governance is a much more complex system. We need to make this invisible system visible: a web of players including CEOs, management, funders, community partners, and members. In doing this, we can change how we see the playing field of governance. Adopting a bird’s eye view reveals there are many interrelated parts of the governance system and this allows us to identify where power may be concentrating, and possibilities for equity that extend beyond the boardroom. 

Boards of directors have also carried an enormous weight of responsibilities, which has grown over the years. The expectations and pressures are only higher now, and governance leaders across the sector are struggling to juggle many factors. Some have likened the experience to “dancing as fast as we can on a shoestring” – and that was before COVID-19.

In short, a lot is being asked of boards. Organizations are facing issues like growing deficits and other high-risk decisions. Placing these decisions in front of a small group of volunteers to make, who may have limited capacity or knowledge is unrealistic and as Vu further points out, could even be harmful to the organization and its mission. Creating a wider network participating in governance decisions not only opens up more possibilities for the work, but takes care of those who are needing to make those decisions.

There are many examples of different board governance models, but they often don’t factor in the organization’s unique circumstances – like fitting a round peg into a square hole. In order to ensure organizations have governance systems and practices that work for them, their governance system must consider their fixed requirements, organizational life cycles, and many other factors. In other words, how can we create what we need rather than simply work with what we were given?

Research shows that there is a for real transformation. So, where to start? One place to start could be reframing the questions we ask about governance to consider the broader governance system, not only the board. For example, instead of asking ‘How can we fix the board’, we could ask ‘What is the most effective way for us to fulfil our governance’? As one governance leader put it, “How can we start seeing the board as the host of governance, rather than the home of governance?” Or imagine, with their “integrity board”, if all organizations started from a place of “what do we want the governance of this organization to make possible for accomplishing our mission?”. 

As the world reconsiders what the future of work will look like, it is time to experiment, be messy and imperfect in order to better govern organizations and in turn, better serve communities. That includes getting innovative in seemingly rigid, unshakeable areas like nonprofit governance. In fact, maybe those areas of greatest rigidity are where we must be most innovative. What could we discover if organizations could shape their own governance, to their own purpose and circumstances? It’s time to push ourselves.

Reimagining Governance, in collaboration with Ignite NPS, is an initiative with the overarching goal of provoking a shift in how nonprofits think about and undertake their governance. Through research, connecting with sector leaders, and experimentation, Reimagining Governance is developing a Transformative Design Process that will enable organizations to shape their own governance, rather than fit into prescriptive models. or get involved by contacting erin@theonn.ca.