From Birdcage Walk

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

Dear Member,

When we held the first of our ‘Implementation Team’ meetings this week, our thoughts once again went back to 1939 when Melvin Oliver and James Young wrote their jazz classic, “Tain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It)”. This was because much of the discussion was not about the perfection of the new vision for our Institution – although of course that is important – but rather about the engagement of the community and their commitment to the changes that will be needed.

There has been much engagement already. The three Review Teams started their work nearly a year ago and the Council first had a chance to discuss their output in a specially convened extra meeting in March. Since then we’ve had two other Council meetings and of course five Trustee Boards where the importance of learning from the past to help us shape the future has been uppermost. The challenge however could perhaps be summed up as making sure any change genuinely solves a problem and is not just another way of achieving the same outcome.

The need for action now is however clear. We have therefore decided to split up the ideas into three groups. The first is a group of ‘just do it’ improvements that have met with universal approval and are within the power of Trustees and the Executive to immediately make happen. These include the creation of a Finance Board, which will meet for the first time on 11 October and the appointment of a Head of Governance and Risk, which we hope to have in position before year end. These mean that we will get a much better overview of all of the Institution’s activities together and we will have on-tap advice to make sure we are taking those financial and other decisions following best practice.

The second group are ones where we need to consult more to avoid unforeseen consequences. Members can login to see all of the eighty or so recommendations that we are reviewing. From that list you can see that there are many around the way we show our accounts and the way we structure our Boards that are up for change. It is clearly important that any steps we take do indeed lead to the progress envisaged. We can only be sure of that when we have consulted and ‘stress tested’ those ideas.

Finally, there is a group where we will need to get permission for change from our regulators. The main oversight for us comes from the Charity Commission, as clearly we are a charity; the Privy Council, as we hold a Royal Charterand the Engineering Council, as we are licensed to confer professional registration. All of these organisations are primed and standing ready to talk to us to share their views. As with the second group of actions however we want to be sure that before we take up their time, we are clear that the changes we are seeking have got widespread support from our membership.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the future of our Institution is now in our hands. Get this right and we can be confident of consensus for modernising our work in support of the engineering profession. To quote the words of the song by Oliver and Young, we know "that’s what gets results".

Colin Brown

Chief Executive