Innovative way to run company Committees
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We are helping a client re-thinking how they run Committees across the organization – the purpose is to re-think from 1st principles, whether there are alternative/ innovative ways of performing the purpose a Committee (e.g. voting, decision making, information sharing)? Instead of the “traditional” way of preparing materials, coordinate and invite members joining formal meetings, taking minutes and follow up etc.
We are hoping to source ideas or interesting case studies to further look into, ideally for Global Institutions (the client is assessing its risk committee structure, but ideas beyond banking is welcomed!). They are looking for levers beyond general committee rationalization (e.g. reducing # of committees, reduce frequency), one example below –
- Digital voting: for a Global bank, one regular Committee mandate is to approve decisions to exit customers - this process was replaced with a digital portal / voting functions
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Appreciate if you could share any of your perspectives or interesting case studies you might have on this!
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I can comment on several committees I participated in, created and/ or redesigned and led when I was at Commercial positions at global retailers
- Move meeting location from the Headquarter of the grocer to a meeting room of a hypermarket nearby, switching hypermarket every 3 weeks to be closer to the “action”
- Create routines in the committee dynamic: temperature check at the beginning, good-news sharing at beginning, store walk before the meeting to share 1 observation, dedicating a slot to bring more junior team members to present a work done by them to show & shine with a more senior audience…
- Assigning a rotating role of committee members to take notes and formalize minutes
- Start reviewing minutes and actions done from last committee before entering new one
- Running some committees in front of the gondolas, walking in the store, with a tablet in hands to get the key figures in a Data viz but no slide and then sit together for a coffee to debrief a list actions to be taken
- Periodically re-challenging each participant about the value of such committee, with simple questions like: is this meeting useful for you? Why? Is the duration and frequency adapted? Any suggestions to improve it ? Logic is was participants to take a more active role and not a passive role of such meeting
Unsurprisingly, the best committees were those where the time was spent to make decisions, even small ones
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We did a lot of thinking on this topic within POP, culminating in an article published with the WEF on “How to make Boards more agile”
The article speaks about Boards specifically but many of these techniques can be applied to other senior committees. In summary, we can use innovative techniques to disrupt the classic committee format (people sitting round a table reviewing and approving documents) to enable more engaged discussion and better decision-making
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That article mentions Amazon, which of course has another well-known approach to make senior meetings better: its memo culture. First search hit is here but you can find plenty more online
Amazon’s Shift from Presentation Culture to Memo Culture (And What You Can Learn from It)
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+1 for the Amazon model. Driving adoption is tough. Predicated on the issue that almost nobody reads slides before the meeting. Building in 5-7 minutes for content review while in the meeting can be effective even if it isn’t the rigid memo format at Amazon. For example, you can summarize key decision points up top, then a cascade of a few pages for all to review. Instead of driving to ideation this drives to outcomes