Regularity and routine are key to running an organisation.
The exciting bits, the innovation, the crisis, and the management of the unpredictable are obviously utterly essential and tightly linked to ongoing success, but the most important thing is to achieve regularity, routine, and almost strict regular boredom in the meetings that you have, which are super effective in touching base, checking where you are, and setting the future.
Today is our three-monthly SLT (Senior Leadership Team) meeting.
This has become a big deal in the diary, we have to prepare heavily for it by putting reports together that everyone can read before the meeting, it has a strict agenda, it has minutes, it's never missed and everyone is present (even the external advice that we receive as part of this group).
It's a board meeting in all but name; it's actually a board meeting in name as well.
There is no drama at these meetings; all the information is included upfront.
It's about decisions and discussions, insight and forward planning.
It's about finding out the stories about what went wrong and creating a story about what can go right.
We have six weekly meetings in between this which are short and less formal and three weeklies, which are an hour to make sure everybody's OK.
It doesn't suit my character. I like to jam a stick into the wheel and make it stop or disrupt or change but I understand entirely that governance is governance and it's what makes good organisations great.
And so, today, we will plot the future for the next three months, six months here; we'll see if we are where we thought we were and how we can get to where we're supposed to be.
The secret here is, though, that it doesn't need to be a big organisation to do this.
You can have an SLT/board meeting in a freelancer company of one every three months; you can shut everything off and go somewhere else and think about where you'll be three months from now and what it takes to get there, and then you can do that every three months and a year from now, you will be a lot better than when you started.
Blog Post Number - 3814