The basic idea of the freedom accountability swap is that employees obtain more direct influence and thereby freedom, as long as they are accountable for those activities. This technique increases autonomy by empowering employees. Compared to other techniques, this approach is a smaller hack to create islands of autonomy rather than full blown change.
Read more: Freedom accountability swap from Shift*Base
A management technique for setting an overall strategic objective and cascading supporting objectives and tasks to employees, hereby ensuring that employees’ contributions are aligned to a single strategic organisational goal. Objectives & Key Results are often referred to as OKR.
Read more: Objectives & Key Results from Shift*Base
The governance meeting is a technique for reviewing how tasks and responsibility could be reallocated to better meet current challenges and opportunities.
Read more: Governance meeting process from Shift*Base
Span of Support is a spin on the traditional notion of ‘Span of Control’, which outlines the areas of activity and number people that report to an individual. Span of Support emphasises that the manager is responsible for supporting, rather than controlling, the people who report to the manager and the activities they carry out. Similar to the Span of Control, Span of Support can either be narrow or wide, but it is argued that organisations that are focussed on supporting rather than controlling in general can have wider ‘spans’.
Read more: Span of Support from Shift*Base
Organising for complexity represents a move away from Taylorism, which espouses specialisation and dividing the company up into thinkers, managers and doers (the workforce). Tayloristic management causes three systemic gaps: the social gap, the functional gap and the time gap. Combined, these gaps create social pressures, prompt managers to use fear in their leadership style, produce unnecessary mechanisms for coordinating activities and inhibit knowledge from the edge to inform decisions. Organising for complexity is an approach developed by Niels Pflaeging.
Read more: Shift*Base’s book summary of Organising for complexity.
Although Buffer is a small technology company, it has hit the headlines due to its founders’ radical transparency. Specifically, and unlike most funded Valley startups, its financials are made totally public as part of the company’s overall management philosophy. All financial data is published regularly on Buffer’s aptly-named BufferOpen blog, and all salaries, including those of the CEO and senior management, are published in a Google sheet together with the company’s detailed compensation formula. Other tactics to create transparency include:
Read more: Buffer case study from Shift*Base.
A minimum viable strategy aims to create a flexible, responsive strategy, designed to guide an organisation’s leadership, but not to overwhelm it with detail. By removing details such as capacity and budget from the strategy, organisations can de-couple these elements so that they can move at different paces.
Read more: A minimum viable strategy from Shift*Base.
In September 2011, the Financial Reporting Council released a publication on Effective Company Stewardship is response to concerns around the current value of financial statements. They concluded that audit committees should provide the narrative information that shareholders and other stakeholders are seeking and currently not finding in the annual report.
In a publication entitled The Buck Stops Here? New Challenges for Audit Committees: An Analysis of Audit Committee Reporting New Challenge Initiative, ICAEW’s Corporate Governance Committee suggest ways in which audit committees could improve their governance reporting to shareholders. These include:
Additionally, if current Financial Reporting Council thinking – that the remit of audit committees is extended to include consideration of the whole annual report and to ensure that the report is fair and balanced – is implemented, boards and audit committees will need to review terms of reference and governance frameworks to ensure that audit committee can discharge its extended remit.
Recent changes in capital markets test the validity of existing models of corporate governance. ICAEW has released a report entitled What are companies responsible for? which identifies four fundamental responsibilities of companies to tackle the corporate governance challenges that have arisen since the global financial crisis. These four responsibilities are:
A company may accept these responsibilities and act accordingly, but being accountable is a separate thing – this is about acknowledging those responsibilities publicly, reporting on how they are met, and being answerable for consequences. If companies achieve this, they should have greater success at developing coherent responses and anticipating expectation gaps in a changing business environment, therefore providing them with a solid foundation for building and maintaining trust.
Read more: What should companies be responsible for?
