Trustee recruitment process vs Design process: Parallels, divergences & unresolved questions

Hello there, dear reader!

I’m just coming out of a conference session on trusteeship and writing this article. The session was titled ‘How to work out who you need on your board?’. Let us start with clarifying this statement a bit deeper. So, why exactly was I attending the conference? I was attending the conference (with two other fellow teammates) because we are starting the process of building a Board of Trustees for the Jitheshraj Scholarship for promising freshmen (JSPF). And why do we need a board of trustees?

There are several reasons, some of which I am listing below -

1. JSPF is an initiative of the AHEAD (Academy for Holistic Education, Awareness and Development) Trust — a public charitable trust registered under the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. Hence, it is our legal and ethical responsibility to do our best as an organisation in fulfilling our mission and vision. A Board of Trustees would help us do so effectively and efficiently.
2. Having a Board of Trustees lends resilience to an organisation and we want to see JSPF being imparted with such resilience.
3. Trustees, with their knowledge, skills and lived experiences, help in creating an effective system of governance of the trust — in terms of its operations, resource management, growth etc.
4. Trustees with their credibility also lend their credibility to the organisation and that credibility is essential for JSPF to be able to create a stronger brand value.
5. Trustees also may help with agile adaptation of the organisation depending on the changes in the ecosystem that the trust functions within.
6. Having a diverse board of trustees with networks expanding far and wide would help JSPF strike up strategic partnerships with relevant organisations to further its initiatives.

Let us get to the second part of my opening sentence now, which is — WHY am I writing this article and what should you expect from this article? This article is primarily a post-conference reflection document where I try to do a comparative analysis and draw parallels and divergences between the trustee recruitment process (as I learnt it in the conference) and the design thinking process (that I am trained in). Writing this article has multiple purposes -

1. It will force me to think deeper about what I learnt at the conference and
2. It will hopefully conjure up more unresolved questions which in turn will translate into either more scope for innovation or more things to learn about in the rest of the week-long conference.

What does a typical design process look like?

Here is a common model that is used to depict a typical design process:

Double Diamond Model of a typical design process | Source

In image above, you see a depiction of the ‘Double Diamond’ model. For the rest of this article I will proceed with the assumption that you understand the model decently enough.

If you don’t know about the model, I’d suggest reading about it in this detailed article before you proceed further.

Trustee recruitment process vs Design process: some parallels

While I was listening to the speaker in the conference I could see some parallels between the ‘Double Diamond Model’ of the design process and the trustee recruitment process that I was learning during the conference.

The process of trustee recruitment (that I was introduced to in the conference) starts with first mapping out the organisational strategy plus challenges plus opportunities with the next 5 years in view. This is akin to the divergent thinking phase of the ‘Designing the Right Thing’ part (refer this article to know more about the model). Here, we are made to think deeper about our medium- and long- term strategic goals to chart out the entire problem space that we might be ‘designing’ our trustee recruitment process for. This is then followed by a narrowing down stage where we chart out which of the strategic goals we already have solutions for or can have solutions for OUTSIDE of the trustee recruitment process — could be staff training, trustee training, capacity building et cetera. This seems akin to the narrowing down phase of the ‘Designing the Right Thing’ part.

The next step in the trustee recruitment process is to find out what all we might be missing from our board based on the preceding analysis and then designing the recruitment process right, for attracting the right people as trustees on our board. We would need to accurately translate what’s missing from our board into what we need from the prospective trustee in terms of professional experience, personal (lived) experience or networks and knowledge. This part of the process seems akin to the ‘Designing the Thing Right’ part of the design process elaborated above.

A summary of the parallels between a typical design process & a trustee recruitment process

Another parallel: The experiences shared by some of the other attendees had a commonality. Most of them tended to forego the first step of the trustee recruitment process which was the phase of mapping out the organisation’s strategic goals. They would directly go into looking for the kinds of skills or lived experiences they seek for in a trustee. This is quite common an error most people commit in the trustee recruitment process, I gathered during the conference. This is also something that the speaker laid stress upon and cautioned us against. To me, this seems akin to the most common design fault that many design students/novice designers commit — jumping to solutions without first exploring the problem space wider and deeper.

Trustee recruitment process vs Design process: some divergences

Let us very briefly talk about another depiction of the same design process below. The reason I am bringing this new model into this article is because it better highlights an extremely crucial feature of the design process. Please have a look at the image below.

Iterative Design Model of a typical design process | Source: Kim Chung (https://kimchung.myportfolio.com/)

In the image above, you see a depiction of the iterative design process. If you observed the Double Diamond Model image (in the previous section) carefully, you might have had a question on the ‘pulsating’ grey area in the quadrilateral to the right of the point labeled ‘Strategy’. Those pulsating grey areas depict different iterations of the design of the solution (recall ‘Designing the Thing Right’). The Iterative Design Model (above) depicts the same iterative process a bit more clearly where you see a distinct label called ‘Test’.

Prototyping (mostly ‘rapid’ prototyping) and testing are extremely crucial features of the design process. Multiple iterations of the process —

rapid prototyping >> testing >> analysing the test results >> improving the previous design based on test analysis

— are exactly what lead us to designing something right.

This is the point where a typical trustee recruitment process seemed to diverge from a typical design process. The closest we could come to was the aspect of board audits, which is something that comes after the trustee recruitment is done and when we are looking to do the next trustee recruitment. This enlarged time gap between the two points in the process renders the trustee recruitment process a bit too ‘stiff’ for making changes as we go. In other words, it leaves little room for drawing the benefits of the iterative design philosophy.

Trustee recruitment process vs Design process: some unresolved questions

The divergence explained above brings me to some unresolved questions that I was left with, by the end of the conference -

1. Is there a parallel to ‘rapid prototyping’ (seen in the design process) in the trustee recruitment process? What does it look like? If not, can we create one?
2. How do we test for our decisions during the trustee recruitment process? What are some things we need to test for? What are the tools available for such testing? How do we know what tests to perform?
3. Can we correct our wrong decisions, if any, in the trustee recruitment process, with some significant amount of agility? In other words, is there a way we can make the trustee recruitment process’ design low fidelity?

I look forward to thinking further on the above questions, discussing them with teammates and hopefully finding answers to some of them in the remaining sessions of the conference.

Here’s to a happening week ahead!

Credits:

1. Thanks to Sivaranjani Subramanian for suggesting some valuable suggestions and edits to this article.
2. My participation in this conference was fully sponsored by the AHEAD Trust.

About the Author:

Siddhant Chandra is a Senior Associate at the Jitheshraj Scholarship for promising freshmen, an initiative by the AHEAD Trust. He works on the scholarship’s Diversity & Inclusion and Community Engagement teams. Siddhant is a graduate of NIT Trichy and Stanford Schools of Engineering and Design.