Hiding in plain sight

This week:

⬆ Up
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) met every statutory target this year which we think is worth celebrating!

Green MP, Hannah Spencer, told the Commons with the courage of her convictions that her colleagues smell of alcohol between votes. It was received as well as hot lager.

The Crime and Policing Bill had Royal Assent granted. Assaulting a retail worker is now a specific criminal offence after eight years of campaigning by shopworkers.

King Charles addressed Congress this week. Spoke plainly about the importance of checks and balances. Said what needed saying, where it needed saying.

The Charity Commission quietly redistributed £1.3m and a £150,000 violin from a sanctioned founder to legitimate causes. Unlikely anyone will write a film about it but it was the right thing to do.

⬇ Down

UK Biobank listed 500,000 volunteers' health data for sale on Alibaba. The platform has been suspended and the damage has been done even though there’s no record of the data being acquired. There is a disclaimer though.

Boeing’s investor disclosures were found to be materially misleading by the US Securities & Exchange Commission because internal safety knowledge was withheld.

The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman publicly accused The Charity Commission of failing to comply with safeguarding recommendations and of attempting to use legal proceedings to block publication.

👁 Watch

Tesco’s and Morrisons’ equal pay tribunal hearings have commenced. The question: were predominantly female store workers paid less than predominantly male warehouse staff for work of equal value? Around 70,000 claimants. Autumn verdict expected. One of the biggest equal pay cases in British retail history.

The Church of England opened a formal consultation this week on its proposed new National Safeguarding Authority, designed to take operational decisions out of the hands of bishops. Survivor groups remain sceptical.

Nestlé’s global infant formula recall is still unresolved. Families in multiple countries remain affected. The company's handling of the response remains under scrutiny.

JD Sports — chair quit after failing to convince the board to oust the CEO. Interim chair in place. Full-year results due 7 May. This story is not over.

This week, ACEVO, the Association of Chairs and nfpResearch published research on what actually happens inside charity boardrooms. All quotes are from the report. 

70% of chief executives and 83% of chairs describe their CEO-chair relationship as strong. And on almost every measure, chairs are more positive than the chief executives who work to them. 

If you are a chief executive reading that, you already know which way it runs in your organisation. If you are a chair, you may not. And that is exactly the point.

Tim Harrison-Byrne of nfpResearch put it plainly: "In many organisations, the CEO and chair may have quite different experiences of working together, and neither may fully realise it." This is not a personality clash or a failure of communication. It is a structural feature of how these roles work. The chair sees the organisation from the boardroom. The chief executive sees it from inside the building, on a Monday morning, when something has already gone wrong and the board is not yet aware of it. Of course they see things differently because their roles require them to.

But when neither of them knows how differently the other sees it, the organisation cannot be honest with itself. Not about how governance is actually functioning. Not about whether processes are being followed in spirit as well as letter. Not about how people are genuinely experiencing leadership. The dual vantage point creates a distortion in the organisation's understanding of its own condition. And organisations that cannot see themselves clearly are vulnerable in ways they have not yet identified.

59% of respondents have experienced challenging board behaviours. Only 4% rate their board a perfect ten. Only 25% have a chair appraisal process in place. The structural work of governance is mostly in place. The relational work, the harder work of knowing what the other person is actually seeing, has not kept pace.

Jane Ide of ACEVO named it directly: "We need to move beyond seeing governance as process and compliance, and focus much more on behaviours, relationships and leadership." 

The chair holds the CEO to account without holding operational control, by design. But the success of that relationship depends entirely on whether the people in it can hold the tension honestly, and before a crisis forces them to. Disruptive events don't wait for the relationship to be ready. They arrive when the organisation is already under pressure and test whether the governance architecture holds, and whether the people inside it can still be honest with each other under it. A relationship that was transactional before the event will not suddenly become relational during it. A chief executive who learned not to say the uncomfortable thing will not say it at the moment it most needs to be said.

After a disruptive event, understanding precisely where the distortion sits across governance, process, and people is the starting point for repair. The Board ORI® gives boards an evidence-based picture of where the integrity gaps are and what they are costing the organisation, so that repair can be targeted rather than merely hoped for.

More often than not, both the chair and the CEO are telling the truth as they see it. The Board ORI® helps organisations see the whole picture and act on what the data reveals.

If something has happened in your organisation and you are not sure how much damage it has caused, that uncertainty is worth paying attention to. Request a confidential conversation with our team at [email protected].

Pilot rates available.

integrity conundrum of the week

This week the Metropolitan Police confirmed it had used Palantir AI software to covertly surveil its own officers without their knowledge. It ingested sickness records, overtime, expenses, building access logs and complaints data. The result: two officers arrested, 98 under misconduct assessment, around 500 served with prevention notices.

The outcome is hard to argue with but the method is nearly impossible to defend.

1. If you discovered that the only way to find out what was really happening inside your organisation was to look without telling anyone you were looking, would you?

2. And if you did, what would that say about the organisation you were trying to fix?

Leah Brown FRSA is the UK's leading specialist in organisational repair.