Provocare Coaching

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard someone say:

“We followed the process.”   Usually, they deliver it with the quiet confidence of someone placing the final card in a royal flush.

Process followed. Boxes ticked. Decision made. Matter closed. Everyone can go home.

Now, I like process. Anyone who has worked with me for longer than five minutes knows that I am distressingly fond of an action log, a colour-coded dashboard and a moderately over-engineered checklist. Give me a complicated governance problem, and I will happily disappear into an options paper until somebody checks whether I am still alive.

So this is not an argument against process. It is an argument against the peculiar organisational habit of confusing process with purpose.

Nobody consciously decides to do this. I have never attended a board meeting where someone stood up and announced:

“I propose that we abandon our mission, mildly disappoint our members and dedicate ourselves entirely to administrative procedure.”

That would at least be refreshingly honest.

Instead, it happens slowly. We create a process to support a principle. The process develops forms, templates, working groups, reporting lines and possibly a new subcommittee. Before long, so much energy goes into managing the process that everyone forgets why it was created.

Then somebody asks an awkward question. Was this what we were actually trying to achieve?

Silence. More papers are requested.

We adore principles until they become inconvenient

Most community organisations have approximately the same collection of favourite words.

Participation. Consultation. Transparency. Inclusion. Collaboration. Accountability. Community-led. Member-led. Person-centred. Evidence-based. Good practice. Values-driven.

We place these words in strategic plans, funding applications, annual reports and speeches. We give them capital letters when we are feeling particularly committed.

The difficulty comes when someone tries to apply them.

Consultation is wonderful until it risks slowing down a decision.

Participation is terrific until participants might say something unexpected.

Transparency is essential until the requested information becomes uncomfortable.

Collaboration is central to everything until another organisation has a different opinion about what should happen next.

Member leadership is deeply valued until members might complicate the neat little conclusion already forming in somebody’s head.

This is where principles undergo a fascinating organisational transformation. They stop being requirements and become optional extras.

Someone explains that the circumstances are unusual. The timetable is tight. The risks are considerable. The board already understands the issues. The members are probably not that interested. Consultation fatigue is real. People are busy. Christmas is approaching. My personal favourite: “Mercury may be in retrograde.”

Before long, the process once considered essential becomes unnecessary because everyone has apparently developed the supernatural ability to know what people think without asking them.

A remarkable efficiency gain. Come on, dinnae kid yourself. Most of the time that’s just consultation being replaced by assumption with better branding.

The values on the wall and the values in the room

The older I get, the more convinced I become that every organisation has two sets of values.

The first set appears on the website. The second set appears when something becomes difficult.

The website values are beautifully expressed. They have usually been through three workshops, a consultant and several rounds of tracked changes. They speak of courage, inclusion, innovation and putting people first.

The values that appear under pressure are less polished but far more revealing.

When a relationship becomes difficult, do we invest in repairing it or declare it too risky?

When people strongly disagree, do we listen or start describing them as emotional?

When a process points one way, but our preferred outcome points another, do we reconsider the outcome or quietly redesign the process?

When someone brings evidence we don’t particularly enjoy because it doesn’t align with our narrative, do we test the evidence or question whether the person was ever qualified to have an opinion?

That is where organisational values become real.

Principles become principles when they cost something—time, comfort, control, certainty or the possibility that, God forbid, we might need to change our minds.

Before that, they are merely attractive stationery.

Sometimes the process comes with a pre-selected destination

There is a particularly creative form of organisational process where the destination is broadly known, but everybody agrees to undertake a journey anyway.

Reports are commissioned. Evidence is gathered. Consultations are planned. Options are evaluated. Great care is taken to document the intellectual magnificence of the exercise.

Then the evidence heads off in the wrong direction. Awkward.

At this point, organisations have choices. They can test their emerging position against the evidence, talk openly about the differences and perhaps reconsider their assumptions.

Or they can decide that the evidence is only one part of a much broader picture, the consultation is no longer required, the person closest to the work is insufficiently independent, and the conclusion should be understood within a context so expansive it can accommodate almost any destination.

A report should never dictate a board decision. Boards have responsibilities beyond whatever sits in a single document. They must consider risk, resources, strategy, staffing and organisational fit. But there is an important difference between weighing evidence and finding increasingly elaborate reasons to explain why inconvenient evidence no longer carries much weight.

An organisation does not have to accept every recommendation it commissions. It should, however, be brave enough to explain where its judgement diverged, why it diverged and whether it was ever genuinely open to travelling somewhere else. Otherwise, the evaluation was not part of the decision-making process. It was just scenery along the route.

“Professional” is not a synonym for emotionally vacant

Another phrase that fascinates me is:

“We need to take the emotion out of this.”  Good luck.

Community organisations are built by people who care. People invest years in relationships, projects, movements and ideas. They work late, travel, volunteer, argue, apologise, build trust and occasionally keep entire organisations upright with goodwill and caffeine.

Then something changes unexpectedly, and everyone is supposed to respond like a mildly interested auditor examining a disputed stationery invoice.

People are emotional because things matter to them.

That doesn’t excuse poor behaviour, personal attacks, or disrespect. Professionalism still matters. But professionalism is not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to recognise our emotions, understand how they influence us, and avoid presenting them as objective truth while wearing a sensible jacket.

Sometimes an organisation says others are being too emotional when what it really means is:

“Their emotional response is making us uncomfortable.”

Meanwhile, bruised pride, frustration, distrust and old disappointments may be sitting on the decision-making side of the table too. They are merely dressed in the more respectable language of strategy, risk and organisational fit.

Emotion doesn’t stop influencing a decision just because somebody labels it “business”.

It just becomes harder to challenge.

Risk has become the loudest person in the room

I believe in risk management. I prefer organisations not to become insolvent, lose all their data or accidentally employ a travelling circus without checking the insurance implications.

But risk should inform judgement, not replace it.

Too often the first question asked about an opportunity is:

“What could go wrong?”

A fair question. The trouble is that some organisations ask it with the enthusiasm of somebody hoping the answer will be “everything”, thereby saving them the inconvenience of doing anything. It is an important question, but it is not the only one.

What could go right?

What value might emerge over time?

What relationships might be built?

What capability could we develop?

Which risks can be mitigated rather than avoided?

What is the opportunity cost of doing nothing?

These questions rarely fit as neatly into a risk matrix. So, risk wins by administrative default.

The familiar feels safer than the possible. Soon the organisation is magnificently protected from every opportunity it no longer pursues.

There is no dramatic collapse. No scandal. No governance inquiry.  Just the slow, well-documented erosion of ambition.

Everything is safely managed and professionally reported, but it’s a bit less meaningful than it was before.

Community development was never designed for maximum efficiency

Community development takes time because people take time.

Relationships take time. Trust takes time. Shared understanding takes time. Repairing harm takes time. Helping people believe they have a genuine voice, rather than a decorative seat at the table, definitely takes time.

This can be frustrating for organisations that are increasingly focused on pace, measurable outputs, and tidy reporting periods.

Community development does not always produce a convenient quarterly return.

Sometimes the outcome is a relationship that becomes useful three years later.

Sometimes it is a leader gaining confidence.

Sometimes it is a group of people discovering they are not alone.

Sometimes it is a conversation that prevents a much larger problem from developing.

These things are difficult to measure, but they are not imaginary.

When organisations begin dismissing anything that cannot be quickly measured as insufficiently tangible, they start cutting away the very relationships that make future outcomes possible.

They often wonder why engagement is low after cancelling the engagement process.

The work is not the meeting.

We are very good at meetings in the community sector.

We prepare agendas about the work, reports describing the work and minutes recording that the work was discussed. Sometimes we establish working groups to consider how future meetings about the work might be improved.

The issue is that the meeting isn’t the work. The work is what happens afterwards.

It happens when someone follows up the action, when a regional group gathers without being chased, when a volunteer is supported, when knowledge is shared, when two organisations begin collaborating because somebody made a thoughtful introduction.

Governance should create the conditions for that work to happen. It should provide direction, accountability and sensible boundaries.

It should not demand that every useful action crawl back through the meeting cycle seeking permission to exist.

An organisation cannot talk its way into becoming dynamic.

At some point, somebody has to be trusted to do something.

Walking, chewing gum and resisting the false choice

This is where we create another unnecessary organisational drama.

Apparently, we must choose.

We can follow process or be flexible. We can manage risk or pursue opportunity.

We can govern well or empower people. We can be strategic or relational.

We can be professional or human.

I remain unconvinced. For the love of all things holy, community organisations should be capable of holding two ideas in their heads at the same time.

The strongest organisations manage to walk and chew gum without opening a working group to explore whether both activities can safely occur at the same time.

They consult and still decide. They listen and still lead.

They manage risk without becoming paralysed by it. They acknowledge emotion without surrendering judgement to it.

They value expertise while testing assumptions. They let people act, then hold them accountable for what happens.

None of this is easy. That is probably why weaker organisations retreat into process. Process feels safer. It gives everyone something to point at later.

“We followed the process.”  Aye, right. But did the process achieve anything beyond providing everyone with a folder thick enough to stop a door?

The uncomfortable question

Every organisation eventually reaches a point where it must decide what it actually values.

This doesn’t align with what the strategic plan says it values. Not what the annual report claims it values.

What wins when participation becomes inconvenient?

What wins when transparency creates discomfort?

What wins when relationships complicate an otherwise tidy decision?

What wins when the evidence does not support the emerging narrative?

What wins when the safest option is also the least ambitious one?

Those moments tell us more about organisational culture than any values workshop ever will.

Because values are not demonstrated by what we say when everybody agrees, they are demonstrated by what we protect when agreement disappears.

Final Reflection

Process matters. Governance matters. Risk matters. Professionalism matters.

But none of them exists in a vacuum.

They exist to help organisations fulfil their purpose, honour their values and make better decisions.

When process becomes more important than purpose, something changes.

The organisation may remain compliant. It may remain solvent. It may continue producing attractive annual reports and holding extremely well-governed meetings.

But it gradually stops behaving like a movement and starts behaving like the administrator of its own shrinking imagination.

That is not usually anyone’s intention. It is simply what happens when an organisation spends so long protecting itself from discomfort that it forgets discomfort was often the reason it existed in the first place.

If that sentence made you think of a particular organisation, decision, or meeting, I meant someone else. Probably.

And if you still think it was about you, well… away and have a wee word with yourself. 😏