Creating lean governance through analysis and insight

We’ve teamed up with Strasys International, a leading analytics and innovation agency, to take our lean governance offer to the next level

Introducing a recent GGI NHS non-executive directors’ development webinar, GGI principal consultant Aidan Rave set the scene: “We exist at a time when we have the highest levels of taxation since the Second World War, and at the same time experiencing some of the highest cost pressures and downward pressures on public sector spending.

“So, we’re squeezed into a box with very little room for manoeuvre – there’s not much space to be increasing revenue flows through taxation and there isn’t much left to cut that hasn’t already been cut. The only way to create some wriggle-room is to innovate, to increase productivity to find greater levels of resource to do the things we want to do.”

That’s the principle that lies behind GGI’s lean governance approach – a range of tools and measures designed to free up your time while also making your governance more efficient and effective.

They include Making meetings matter, a programme that helps you to identify and eliminate unnecessary meetings, resulting in huge efficiency gains – one trust we worked with reclaimed nearly 1,400 hours of executive time per year by getting rid of more than 500 meetings thanks to the programme.

Taking our offer to the next level

Now we’ve teamed up with Strasys International, a leading analytics and innovation agency, to take this to the next level – through a two-part analytics and insight offer for boards.

The offer comprises:

1. using analytics and artificial intelligence to analyse what boards spend their valuable time discussing, by looking at meeting minutes and recordings, presentations, board papers etc.
2. working with boards to use the insights provided by that analysis to build an understanding of themselves and the way they work to a level that has not previously been possible – and then developing a strategy to improve their governance.

This goes much further than the ‘two-dimensional’ insights traditionally laid out in board papers each month.

Basing lean governance improvements on reliable data is an essential part of the process. As Strasys director and chief innovation officer Nadeem Moghal said at our NED event: “One of the things we learn when we engage with organisations is that there’s an interesting gap between what they understand is going on and what is actually going on. What we bring to this is the analytic evidence base and the contextual wrap that shows the opportunity to embed lean governance.

“The NHS has always had a linear approach to modelling and problem solving. Things are really complicated so we typically take a siloed approach that’s comfortable, we break up the complex problem into bits, make decisions and hope for good results. In my experience, something does come out of it but it’s often not what we wanted or hoped for. This is compounded by the assumptions we make, the biases we bring, and a lack of good evidence-based insight.

“The unintended consequence is that the harder people keep doing what they’ve always done using a cost improvement approach, the more productivity declines.”

Breaking that cycle calls for a new approach. And we believe our analytics and insight offer is just that.

No one else is currently providing this combination of scientific rigour and governance expertise to help boards deliver better value, safety and sustainability.

Contact us today if you’d like to find out more.