From Birdcage Walk

The latest in our ongoing series of updates about activities at the Institution.

Dear Member,

Firstly, many thanks to those of you who take the time to read this page each week.  It’s certainly something that gives those of us working at Birdcage Walk a chance to share ideas and inform a wider audience about the institution’s progress.  I hear that we have had some issues with getting the blog section at the bottom to work properly, but as this is my week to take on the editorship then I am hopeful that it will now all go smoothly.

I want to start by thinking back to the time when I was last President in 2001/2002.  That was the year I was leading on changing our Governance from our previous leadership by Council, to one of leadership by Trustees.   The goal was to ensure that we had much more rapid decision making processes, undertaken by clearly democratically elected members of our Institution. It was meant to remove the challenge of being run by such a large Council, in excess of 60 people, that often made it difficult to act either clearly or quickly. I would welcome your views, but I feel that to a large extent we have achieved that.  What we have clearly also managed to achieve however, is to provoke our first Special Meeting in our history, and so I and the Trustees are set to thinking once again that perhaps there is a ‘third way’ that is better still.   I am certainly looking forward to hearing the output of our Governance Review next Spring to understand what lessons we can learn from the recent past that will improve the way we do things in the future.

It is important we learn those lessons and make changes, as we have already lost three Trustees in recent weeks.  I am pleased to say that in working with the President Elect we have been able to identify two very capable replacements and if our nominations are ratified by the remainder of the Trustee Board we should be able to let you know who they are very soon.  They will be in place by the next Trustee Board on 5 December.  My hope is that in parallel we can also let you know about the make-up of the Review teams and their Terms of Reference around the end of this month, by when the Trustee Board will have had enough time to review and hopefully endorse what is emerging.

One of our guiding principles is to engage our membership and especially our active membership, much more than in the past.  As you read last week, CEO Colin Brown has been working to present a plan for 2019 to the Trustee Board on Wednesday 26 September.  After financial stability, the first thing I can reassure you about is that we will be looking for "harnessing the power of members" to take a much higher profile than in previous years.  I have been hugely encouraged by the large number of members who have come forward with ideas and offers of help in the six weeks since I’ve been here.  It would seem bizarre to me now not to grasp their offers of help with both hands.

Finally, I have had my first opportunities over the last ten days to represent you at external meetings.  I have had the pleasure of meeting with Lord Robert Mair (President of the Institution of Civil Engineers) and Nick Winser (President of the IET).  I can report back that they could not have been more welcoming of me, and supportive of future collaboration with us.   This reflects what I heard in our own Council on 1 August where there was a desire for our Institution to move forward with modernisation.  I am delighted that our Council is forming a small sub-group to work on not only what modernisation and closer working with others might be, but on the communication exercise that makes sure good ideas then get the support that they need from our wider membership.   I may only have a further eight months to run as your President, but  I very much hope that despite the speed with which that will go by, we will all be able to look back from next May with satisfaction at the changes we have made.

Tony Roche

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