Take the paper as read...

In the modern organisation good governance requires that the right people are involved in the decision making process before a way forward is chosen. The use of a committee, with representation from every department or function, is the traditional bureaucratic solution to make sure all parties have been, and have been seen to be, consulted. This construct, whilst convenient from the perspective of the Chair, and providing a neat and seemingly robust audit trail, is often highly inefficient for participants and for presenters seeking the endorsement of a plan or proposal.

Committees inevitably only meet on a periodic basis so can introduce delay as decisions are deferred to the next meeting, or worse still only make it to the agenda to find there is insufficient time allotted and are deferred again.

The concentration of a range of matters into a single meeting can produce a meeting pack of papers so large that it is infeasible for any committee member to read them, much less to analyse or reflect deeply on their content or consult with their teams. The inevitable result is that members focus only on matters in which they have a significant vested interest or opinion, under-utilising the collective wisdom of the group.

In the worst case the committee becomes a series of bi- or tri-lateral exchanges between the chair and the minority of members most directly affected whilst the remainder, who most probably have not read the subject matter, remain silent. Reciprocity on the part of committee members can promote a culture of 'not stepping outside your lane' or 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' mutual support arrangements. Furthermore, for complex or controversial subjects the committee meeting is often a foregone conclusion with critical pre-meetings having already taken place to preposition the key decision maker (usually the Chair).

From the perspective of the proposer the committee can be a challenging body to engage with. Inevitably some members will have a deep interest and knowledge of the subject and will, if they haven't been briefed before, want to probe how conclusions were derived. Others will have less expertise and, even if the matter isn't relevant to them, may (quite reasonably) feel the need to raise objections if they don't understand what is being proposed but are being required to endorse the decision with their presence. In a time constrained environment this produces a conflict of trying to persuade two very different audiences at the same time. In my experience this challenge is particularly acute for technical project proposals where discussions can become superficial, and as a result, the consequences of decisions not fully understood. For these reasons committee meetings can become one-size-fits-all perfunctory governance theatre where the outcomes are predetermined.

In days gone by when it was difficult to bring senior people together into one place at a single time, and the overhead of doing so was significant, it made sense to group many decisions together into a single periodic meeting with everyone attending for all items. These days, with remote working, flexible scheduling and technology able to provide an automatic audit trail of how decisions were arrived at (available to every meeting not just hallowed committees), these constraints are much reduced.

Perhaps this gives us the freedom to have the appropriate people in the appropriate virtual room for the appropriate topics, allowing us to give those topics the time and focus they deserve.

(Views in this article are my own)