Musings on governing a club or school and the effectiveness of Boards - the Carver Model

Reflections on ‘Policy Governance' – Part 1

How efficient are your Board meetings, whether it is a board of a local sports club, arts association, school or some other association or organisation? Do you spend long hours in discussion over minute details of management or approvals or some other operational issue but never really see any progress in the organisation? Is the strategic plan hidden in some folder? Can your Board really sway the principal or chief coach or art curator and achieve outcomes that the Board's vision has encompassed? Can you define on whose behalf you, as board member, are acting? If it is merely yourself, you may be in breach of the spirit of the law if not the law itself, for most Boards of association are legally acting on behalf specific owners of the association. And that raises the question – can you identify who the moral and legal owners of your organisation are – not your customers – but the owners ? Do you act for them? Can you prove this?

If you answered yes to the first few questions and no the final few your Board is in desperate need of a new governance framework. I have just completed a little over seven years on a school board, many as a deputy chair and finally as a chair. I am not an expert in running boards, but have learnt a lot, especially about Policy Governance ® developed by John Carver. We also had a board that spent many hours of meetings talking about matters we really did not need to speak about and in many cases had no right to speak about – I am not a licenced teacher nor an expert in pedagogy – yet we were telling the principal how to do his job rather than telling him what we wanted as the end result of him doing his job.

As a result of a search and some wise advice and counsel our school (King's Baptist Grammar School) adopted the Carver model or governance framework called Policy Governance®. The method allows the expert in running schools – the Principal sometimes called the Chief Executive Officer (and many schools do use the term CEO or COO rather than principal especially when budgets run into the tens of millions, although this person must be a registered teacher, in this State at least.) What of the role of the Board? The Board stays out of management and provides a concrete, flexible policy framework to determine 1) the End result and 2) the boundaries in which the CEO can operate, 3) including linkages to the Board, and 4) boundaries for the operations of the Board (more later). It is second item that trips a lot of people up, although understanding ENDS often also confuses those taking on the Carver model the first time. The board no longer MANAGES but GOVERNS and they do it though policy. Furthermore the policy can be fairly non-specific, except when there is an issue of interpretation . Carver states the method works “through explicit statements of values, rather than reactively or through event-specific decisions”.

Now this is a very radical difference. One Board attempts to tell the CEO of a widget making organisation on how to make widgets – when no one on the Board actually knows what goes into a widget, although all Board members make thorough use of them. The policy governance Board sets the boundaries for what the widget maker can do to make these widgets (e.g. only materials less than $40/kg can be used) and what the final product or END will be – widgets must be suitable for disable persons older than 65 years and affordable for those on a pension. Note that in this case the Board does not tell the widget maker how to do his job. Also note that the END is very specific, but perhaps not specific enough – you could add “the battery life must exceed 15 hrs. between charging”. It is the CE and his engineers who will need to find the best solution within the cost limitation. In John Carver's philosophy, the most general policy is created first, and more specific ones are added, only to a point where the desired END is achievable or interpretable.

One more thing – the Board never instructs staff – the Board only instructs the CEO with one voice, through policy, who then uses his or her professional management skills in organising the staff to achieve the END. In my school this was specifically written into policy to ensure it did not happen – too much confusion arises if the Board instructs both the CEO and one or more staff members. The converse is also true. Staff do not go to the Board, but rather the CEO for instruction. And for those worried about complaints etc., we had a code of conduct and of course various other laws to ensure fair treatment of staff and method of review.

What does this mean in real life?

Firstly, you must have a clear vision and mission of the organisation. Without it, you cannot possibly decide upon the end result you want. I would suggest this must be in the foundational document such as the Constitution. Note carefully – Policy Governance does not use the term “strategy” because the entire framework is the strategy, and the END is what is being produced, changed, created for a specific group of people or needs and some defined cost – the END is the result or outcome. The vision therefore needs to articulate who the product or service will be for, what people or need will enjoy the product, benefit or service and the cost.

Secondly the Board needs to understand who their legal and moral owners are – on whose behalf is the Board acting? This is because legally and morally you act on behalf of the owners in instructing the CEO. In my case we did not know who the owners were. The Constitution or founding documents merely indicated that any parent was equivalent to an owner and furthermore, this ceased at death or if an application in writing was made! This posed a problem because after 20 years the body of parents was large, nebulous, generally un-contactable and un-interested (although one of our greatest source of new enrolments is from parents who were once students of the school – a show of confidence in the school, if ever there was). You may well ask why it was written in this way. Like many church schools, this school started with less than 50 students in a church where the parents contributed to the management and governance of the school, putting in both time and resources to get it going. Parents were church members who owned the church and school – when their children grew up, the parents remained owners, because they were in the church. However as the school grew and diversified it had to move outside of the church and become established as an organisation in its own right. The Constitution did not keep up with the reality of the school. We could never get a quorum at an annual general meeting because the ownership body was too large. Furthermore, most parents saw themselves as customers not owners. So we set about changing the Constitution to from an association within the organisation (there are many models for this) who are ‘interested and concerned persons' and who act as the legal and moral owners of the School. It is to these people we seek feedback on policy proposals, ask about where they think the school should be heading, what the elements of the ENDS should be, discuss difficult issues such as funding, generally consult as the ‘ownership' group and seek endorsement for new Board members.

Thirdly, it means you must be able to trust the CEO. The policy governance method cannot be prescriptive, else you would end up with a telephone dictionary sized policy manual, unworkable and impossible to maintain. I had a wonderful relationship with the CEO – he is not your best friend, although he or she may be – but a subservient of the Board, with which the Chair has an employer – employee relation. As a Board you have a legal responsibility to appoint the CEO. Therefore, if you cannot trust your CEO, appoint a new one! How do you determine whether your CEO is any good? Carver states that the achievement of the ENDS is your sole method of determining the achievement of the CEO. More on this later.

Fourthly – you must butt out of management issues. You have no say in management, except by a set of “executive limitations” policy. How the widget is made is NOT YOUR BUSINESS (I will explain in more detail another time because this is not quite true – for instance if you want only “green” energy to be used, then you demand this in policy as an “executive limitation”). How the grade two teacher teaches language is NOT YOUR BUSINESS, ever! You as the Board however, can demand an END that says that you expect all grade two children to be able to meet the 75% percentile compared with “like” schools (there is a cost to this that you will need to consider). You also demand monitoring (which also costs and needs to be funded), through policy, that will indicate whether the method being used achieves the result – but you as a non-teacher do not enter into pedagogical debates.

Therefore, the most important element as representatives of the owners of the organisation is a set of policies that gives the CEO a framework (which are really the outer bounds, not the inner details) in which to work, along with the expected results called ENDS, the nominated people or need this applies to and the cost. For a school the END is in relation to what results/benefits/changes for which people and at what cost. For instance your school may want children prepared for vocational employment, who live in your area at a cost affordable by the 30 percentile of the district. Our school is a Christian school and the Board along with owners determined the END was “ KBGS exists as an R-13 Christian School to provide excellence in education and to create a Christian community where students experience the love of God and have opportunity to respond to Him, at a cost comparable to the geographical area and financial capacity of parents.” Under this high level policy sits seven specific ENDS what articulate the overall mission and vision of the school as set out in the Constitution.

Principal elements of Policy Governance- my observations

Ownership - the Board connects the organisation with the owners. The Board governs - it is not merely an advisor; in fact it proffers little advice but commands the CEO. Owners are not necessarily the stakeholders, or at least not all the stakeholders. In our case most stakeholders saw themselves as customers not owners.

Policies in four groups, with various depths (i.e. some policies have more explicit information, for instance in our case, dealing with media):

1. Ends policies (can be called anything) - speaks to the organisation through the CEO and is what the owners want in the final product or service etc.
2. Executive Limitations - speaks to the CEO and sets the bounds in which he or she acts to achieve the Ends.
3. Governance Process - speaks to the Board and sets the bounds in which the board acts.
4. Board - CEO linkages - speaks to the Board and CEO and creates the conduit between owner and organisation. 

The Board always speaks with one voice, with a conduit to the CEO via the Chair, and in written policy. Therefore the authority comes from the Board, not a group of individuals acting for themselves.

The ENDs forms the so called strategy, or rather, the substance of the mission of the organisation , although this term need not ever be used. They are (1) the results, changes, or benefits that should come about for (2) specified persons, beneficiaries, needs or some targeted group, and (3) at a defined cost or relative priority for the various benefits or various beneficiaries. Ends statements cannot include every benefit, but must reflect the mission of the organisation.

Executive Limitations: are policies that govern the CEO, written in a proscriptive way such that 1) the means (or processes) are not prescribed and, 2) place boundaries around unacceptable activities or processes, irrespective of their functionality. These are often written as exceptions - the CEO must , and accordingly must not fail to … etc.

Any Reasonable Interpretation: This aspect of Policy Governance is often the most frightening to Boards. It means you are leaving the interpretation of policy to the CEO and his or her staff, and the Board (if the Board policy has been written by the owners), who will use their professional knowledge and understanding in interpreting these. For hard cases, or where ambiguity existed we delegated this to a subcommittee. (I would suggest Carver policy takes 3-5 years to bed down, with constant refinement. Also I recommend also using “scenarios” or “test cases” to test the policies for interpretability, functionality and workability.)

Governance Process spells out how the Board behaves. A board that cannot follow its own policies is not worthy to be a Board.

Monitoring: The board monitors organizational performance solely through 1) assessment of whether a reasonable interpretation (having the CEO write what the interpretation was helps here) of the Ends and policies, and 2) a reasonable interpretation of the Executive Limitation. The Monitoring IS the CEO's evaluation, i.e. there is no performance review as such because the monitoring reveals all.

Agenda: Since the Board is always forward focused in this model, the Board sets the agenda for the short term - say one year and for the long term - in our case up to six years as it match our financial/building/maintenance cycle. Of course, the agenda is fine-tuned prior to each meeting, but the Board as a whole, which may as in our case included the CEO, carefully prepared a 12 month agenda. This the CEO found helpful, as it set (3 months prior to the New Year) the monitoring agenda. The Agenda is set by the Board, not the CEO. It does not contain review of staff or process activities or endless approvals, but is a proactive discussion of governance. Indeed we reviewed all Board meetings, which included questions as to whether the owners were in purview, whether we deviated into management or process issues or whether the discussions were forward focused and governance orientated. Only a structured agenda, with brief supporting documentation and written expected outcomes for every item avoided falling into old ways!

The Reality - my observations

The Carver Model really worked. It took a lot of effort in learning and implementing it, but the pain was very worthwhile. It also requires constant vigilance, because it is easy to fall back into old ways and meddle with management rather than governance - the Chair must be strong on this point.
In my situation, being a school, outside influences had to be taken into account, such as the school's registration process, Commonwealth requirements and State requirements. However, these can be built into the Executive limitations in a fairly broad statement without compromising governance. Furthermore, we created time-limited Executive limitations for specific projects - i.e. when extraordinary funding was received for a library and sports centre as part of the Commonwealth (Australia) BER program. The executive limitation set out the expected monitoring and various aspects related to value for money and expenditure specific for these projects (in the end it was barely half a page long).

Creating an active ownership group is taking its time, and learning to interact with it is also a work in progress. However, we know who exactly these people are, and they do have a keen interest in the organisation.

The Carver model allows the CEO to get on with his or her job and is not much concerned about the process he or she follows, provided the END's are met. This posed a dilemma in a Christian school, because our philosophy involves the person him or herself, their self-care and spiritual care. That is, the Board took an interest in the CEO (the Principal in my case) as a person. Therefore, we stepped outside of Carver and undertook performance reviews that excluded outcomes but examined these four elements related to these two aspects – spiritual and physical self-care. Having a great principal is what a school wants, but if he or she burns themself out in a few years doing good, then the School may be left in a worse position.
 

Bee Keeping

I have been keeping bees most of my life – well not quite - from the age of 16 at least. My father was not one for allowing teenagers to be idle, for idleness created mischief. Since my father grew fruit, there was always a worry the flowers would not be pollinated and fruit set. One way to achieve this is to bring bees into the orchards. So he encouraged me to take up bee keeping (I also took up building kayaks with my brothers and a cousin – also a great past time for keeping teenagers out of mischief) . My great uncle (Uncle Carl) was a bee keep as was his family, and we had some bee keepers in the district, so I had a few people to learn from. So from the age of 16 I have always had a few hives – sometimes many more, but over the past few years 1 or 2 – enough to keep the family, relatives and friends in honey. At once stage I was going to expand to 40 or more hives, but interstate employment stopped this as did Ash Wednesday – I lost all but four hives. The timber which I was to build the many supers – bee boxes from - (from our own forest) lay in one of the farm sheds for many years, but was turned into very large book cases when my wife and I purchased our current home 17 years ago.

Examining frames from a hive in my back-year

Fixing a jammed focus lens in a Panasonic Lumix camera

The Issue

The Camera (Panasonic Lumix HDC TZ10) developed a fault displaying the error as shown in the photograph below – “system error (focus)”.  When turned on and off, the lens would not retract, and it showed the error message. What was uncertain was where the problem was – for instance was the problem in the cams of the zoom lens (there are three sets of lens that slide in and out on cams) or was it within the focusing element which focuses the light on the light capture device – a CCD in the case of the Panasonic? It turned out to be grit on drive of the 4th focus lens which jammed it.

I found a service manual for the camera at http://www.scribd.com/doc/96821254/DMC-TZ10-ZS7-Service-Manual (assessed 29 March 2013) which made repairing the camera very much easier. Other models might be found on http://www.statmyweb.com/s/repair-guide-tz10
Dave Baar has a detail description of his ordeal at the link below, for a slightly different  camera - Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS8 Camera on http://media.davebaar.com/wordpress/?p=793 (accessed 29 March 2013), but well worth the read.

First attempts

Using his and other’s suggestions I tried

1.    Low batteries - a camera may not function properly when batteries a low. Insert a fully charged set to see if things improve.
2.    Full memory card – when a memory card is full, a digital camera may not turn on (not my problem as it could turn).  Download all the photos, back them up and delete them from the memory card.

Other ideas tried

1.    Remove the batteries, followed by the memory card. Then install new batteries/freshly charged batteries, and turn on the camera.
2.    Place the camera flat on its back on a table, pointed at the ceiling. Press and hold the shutter button down, and at the same time press the power-on button. The idea is that the camera will try to autofocus while the lens is extending, hopefully seating the lens barrel guide pins in their slots.
3.    Blow compressed air in the gaps around the lens’ barrels with the idea of blowing any sand or grit that may be jamming the lens out of the camera. My camera shop warned me not to do this as they believed this procedure would drive dust further into the camera, however, I did try it with no avail. In my case the grit was on a screw-drive lug that raised or lowered the focus element, which had grease on it – no amount of blowing would have removed it. Don’t use a hair dryer!
4.    Repeatedly tap camera onto some soft padding with the intent of dislodging any particles that may be jamming the lens. Other variations include hitting a side of the camera against the palm of your hand. A lot of people have reported success with this method. Do this with utmost care – for although I found the Panasonic camera was very well constructed, hitting or knocking the camera it could dislodge important components!
5.    Take a still piece of thin strong paper say 2 cm x 8 cm and slide this between the gaps in the lens elements at an angle, with the hope that grid/sand that could be jamming the lens elements can be dislodged. When I tried this I recovered a small amount of dust and hair.
6.    Try forcing the lens – this worked for me, in that the lens closed up, although it automatically extended when I turned it on, and would not close on power-down. I did this my gently twisting and pushing the lens elements into the camera – it closed the lens but did not fix the problem. Apparently more people have reported success with this method than with any of the other methods. HOWEVER, there's obviously some potential for damaging the camera.
7.    Dismantle the camera – which the rest of the blog is about.

Dismantle the camera

Preparation

You will need a very clean and as dust-free place to pull apart the camera – homes are notoriously full of dust – from skin and hair particles, to traffic derived dust, and soil & organic matter. An office at work may be cleaner else chose a room where the door can be closed for a few hours prior to use and if possible one with a short piled carpet. Homes are usually very very dusty. I have both worked in clean rooms and monitored dust in homes, including my own. The very act of walking on carpet will entrain dust into the air. I used my home office.
Obtain a number of clean containers to place screws, electric cable and camera parts.
You will need a triple zero (OOO) Phillips head screw-drivers. I found 000 difficult to find – in the end a cheap Chinese set provided the necessary tool.
I photographed the exercise – in order to write this blog – but more importantly to tell me where the pieces went. If you can borrow a second camera (I used my-own, the camera I was fixing was my wife’s). I found this useful as although the manual had good diagrams, they did not always provide enough detail, such as how far the ribbon-cable needed to insert into each attachment.

Pulling the camera apart

1.    Begin by removing the battery and memory card out.
2.    The front and back cases can be removed by unscrewing the retaining screws noting that the back has a cable attached to it – use care.

Front cover

Rear cover

3.    Unplug the flex-cables. I found by flipping the rear case around 180º I could access the flex-cable plug. The cable is removed by flipping up the locking tabs on the plug retainer (from the left side in the photo below – arrow) with a fine flat screwdriver and pulling the cable out gently. The cable is wiggled free horizontal to the camera body – do not pull it upward.

4.    Once the flex-cable has been pulled out of its plug the back can be removed totally, exposing the frame-plate assembly.

5.    The frame-plate (silver plate) then can be removed by unscrewing the three silver screws.

 6.    Remove Gyro flex cable, very carefully – it is plugged-in at both ends, on the left of the camera, as pictured above, and in the middle. Flip the locking tabs carefully up, and wiggle the cable free – photo below.

7.    The lens unit can be removed once the two large flex cables are unplugged. Once again the flex cable locking tab is flipped up with a small flat screw-driver and the flex wiggled free. The photo below also shows the two of the three screws that holds the lens unit in place which need to be unscrewed.

8.    The lens unit then can be separated from the camera.
 

The lens unit consists of the zoom motor unit and the master flange unit.

   
9.    The zoom motor unit can be separated from the master flange unit by undoing eight (8) screws, which includes a small screw on the side of the unit that holds a flex plug unit for the zoom motor. Note that I did not separate entirely the two units by removing the flex joining them. The zoom motor can be seen on the bottom left of the photo - below, and the lens focus motor on the bottom right (arrow). The right motor drives a screw-drive that lifts a lug, which is attached to the final focus lens (4th lens) - left arrow. The final focus lens (4th lens) focuses the light onto the light collection device – called a charge-coupled device (CCD) – which can be seen in the middle of bottom unit below (arrow).

10.    Inspect the worm drive. In my case the lug would not progress up or down due to grit. I cleaned the drive with an ear-bud soaked in white spirits and hand wound it up and down the entire screw – repeating the procedure until I was certain it was free. I then applied some very light grease obtained from Jaycar Electronics (your hobby shop may have some, as it’s very useful for axels found in model cars and helicopters etc). The manual states that 3-5 mg of grease needs to be applied to the focus motor lug and the two 4th lens frame positioning poles (only one is indicate below) – shown with arrows in the photo below. Be careful that you do not place grease on the lens – I did and it took an hour to clean it off!

11.    Reassemble in reverse order. Before doing so, using a magnifying class, make sure you have left no lint or dust on the lens elements or the light capture device (CCD), both bottom and topside. It’s very hard to see dust on the 4th lens element, but using a desk light and slowly tilting the lens while looking across it, one can capture whether there is any small dust particles. I used a very fine artist brush to remove dust particles.
12.    Ensure the flex is pushed firmly back into the plugs and the locking tags are pushed flush with the plug-unit. On my second try I did not do this well, and the camera did not work!
13.    The screws are very tiny and the threads can be easily stripped. Apply enough pressure that the parts are pressed together and the screw is not loose. You may strip the thread if too much pressure is applied.

All the best! It took me three goes to get it right. The first I left lint on the CCD, the second I did not push one of the flexes into its plug correctly, and the third – the camera has been used for two months now with no issue at all.