Several years ago, I was contracted to complete a report on governance in a regulatory body in a Canadian province.  The organization had used a single questionnaire to gather information from the board members on their opinions on how the governance model was working. The questionnaire had been developed by the Department of Government Services.  It was my job to take the survey data and turn it into a report that included both findings and recommendations.

To say I was thunderstruck at the nature of the data that was collected would be an understatement.  The questions were poorly worded (often including two questions in one making it impossible to draw conclusions).  They were all over the proverbial map – communication, organization, planning, etc. which, of themselves, were not generally inappropriate.  However, they were defined in such nebulous terms that it was difficult to determine what they were looking for by way of responses to individual questions and what they saw as an effective governance structure which should have led to more focused questioning.  In other words, the questionnaire and the process were poorly conceived and even more poorly delivered.

This caused me to start to do some research on effective governance.  As would be expected, I started with Carver and then went on from there.  In the process, I came up with a list of five qualities that the research directed me to as earmarks of effective governance.  It was clear that little that was available in the research had impacted on the Department questionnaire.  At the same time, I was surprised to find that there was little on the process for gathering information on governance except through questionnaires which were sent often only to board members, thereby ignoring other sources of information that could impact on the findings and recommendations in a governance review.

It was at that point that Bendel Services began its work on two fronts:

• the correlates of effective governance
• the most advisable ways to gather information on governance – and from whom.

In the April 8^th and 15^th blogs we shall look at these two topics separately.  The final entry, April 22, 2023, on the “Governance Assessment Instrument” will put some of Bendel’s ideas into practice in terms of helping boards to obtain meaningful feedback from a variety of sources on “how we are doing”.  Stay tuned!

Dr. Dan