Demography is destiny

Who is Saint John?

The title of this blog entry is taken directly from Richard Florida's book Who's your city?, page 242. One need look no further to find out how an open data portal ought to introduce itself...and how a city might define itself. 

Florida notes that:

• 39% of Canadian households are married couples. What is the make up of Saint John?
• 22% of Canadians live in a classic nuclear family. What does Saint John look like?
• 5% of Canadian families are single parent led with children. How many such families are there here? How many are led by women? Men? What is their economic status?
• 10% of Canadians live alone. How many live alone here?
• 1.5% of all Canadian households are gay or lesbian. What is the %'age here?
• How many people speak French as a first language in the home? English? other?
• How many people were born here and how many are "from away"?
• How many people move to the city? How many people stay? How many people move away? (and what are their age groups?)

Answers to these very basic questions will give a prospective migrant an idea of how varied the population is and how he or she might be accepted in the community. 

Times change and Canada is changing. An open data portal with even this minimal data will inform the community , and those who might consider moving here, how and if, Saint John is changing with Canada, how inclusive it is and by extension, how creative it is. But most importantly, even this baseline data will inform a person about his/her "fit" and with the city's "personality". 

How might Saint John determine "what matters most" when describing its character??

NBPSPP Board Evaluation

The purpose of evaluation is to examine how well the Board implement's the organization's strategic plan, attends to issues of quality and manages risk. There is no point in performing an evaluation unless its results are reported. 

Such a report alerts the stakeholders (us as retirees, in this case) about the level of skill of the members and the degree to which they are able to diligently perform their duties, on our behalf. 

The benefits of a Board evaluation include:

• it informs us how well the board is serving our interests;
• it ensures that there is a role differentiation between Board and management;
• it assures us that there is collegiality and teamwork in governance;
• it measures the degree to which the mechanics of accountability are achieved;
• it assures us that the board it engaged in ethical decision making;
• it assures retirees that decisions are transparent;
• it leads to better board functioning. 

Typically, the board evaluation process is led by the governance or the nominating committee. For NBPSPP, it is led by the governance committee. At the last annual meeting, the Board Chair reported that there was a skills matrix self evaluation. This is certainly one approach. This informs the individual board member that they ought to be skilled in a number of different areas. However.....this is not the whole story.

There is much, much more to this than just that.

1. The results ought to be presented to the Board, and discussed with regards to the Plan's strategy.  Do trustees have the skills to fulfill the strategy? (don't know)
2. How will the individual and the Board, generally, address deficiencies? (don't know) 
3. Should the Plan members be told about these deficiencies? 
4. Perhaps members are being too hard on themselves..or perhaps they lack insight. Is a self evaluation followed by a peer evaluation? Does the Board Chairman conduct individual interviews with these results in hand? The trustees, after all report to the Board Chairman.(no, no)
5. How does the evaluation process affect the Board continuing education program for the year? (doesn't appear, so)
6. How does the Board evaluation process affect member recruitment? (nope)
7. Is there a more detailed evaluation of Board leadership? By whom is that done ?  And are the results reported to the membership? (no, and no)

It is all well and good to find fault but what might be some (relatively) quick fixes to this problem?

1. Under take a quick and dirty peer assessment. This will introduce the concept of a dedicated and accountable review process.
2. A self review process can include an assessment of where you and a  comparison to where the Board, generally,  thinks of its performance as a team. 
3. A peer review process of board functioning can additionally, point to areas where the board might perform better.
4. Follow this with a peer assessment of Board leadership, generally, and at the committee level. 
5. Where there are new Board members, under take an evaluation through the Chair , of the new members' performance. 

Such an approach will:

• help new members get a feel for their own performance and where it might improve;
• help leaders serve their members better;
• help the Board function better as a team;
• help member: member relationships

by touching on:

• policy adherence;
• strategy implementation;
• stakeholder connection

Tomorrow, I will cover a few topics specific to this kind of performance appraisal.