BOOF! Breaking down a brutal Governance Review
NZR members politely offered unique chance to vote for their own redundancy ($)
Like a Batman comic, the much-anticipated Governance Review of New Zealand Rugby landed today.
A fist to the face of the provincial unions.
KAPOW!
A roundhouse kick at the NZR board.
WHAM!
A karate chop across the necks of the executive.
AIEEE!
Another punch down at the PUs.
THWACK!
It made for captivating reading. Sometimes grim, mostly sobering, occasionally woolly and, for the cynical at heart, quite entertaining.
If this line from the report doesn’t put you at the beating heart of a mid-level government bureaucracy, nothing will.
“The chief executive’s reporting dashboard has 48 Key Performance Indicators; most of them are tactical at best and lacking measurability. There is simply too much indistinguishable detail coming to the board.”
In short, the review, chaired by David Pilkington, has two broad recommendations: for New Zealand Rugby to be governed by a fully independent board; and the establishment of a Stakeholder Council to advise at a governance level.
The 134-page document essentially boils down to that, but the devil is in the detail offered to the public of the inner-workings of, by reputation, one of New Zealand’s most introverted incorporated societies.
It’s not a perfect document. One thing that stood out like rhinoceros at a polar bear convention was that the review eviscerates the board and executive for a lack of strategic clarity and “measurables”, yet proposes a Stakeholder Council whose success would be determined by: “[becoming] a body that is taken seriously and has an unquestioned ‘seat at the table’ when important discussions about the future of rugby in New Zealand are taking place”; and, “perform[s] its core functions efficiently and effectively and is acknowledged as having added greater value in the wider rugby ecosystem than the sum of its parts would suggest”.
Can you get any more opaque than that?
Still, if you have any investment in the game it is well worth a read. It is now incumbent on the current board and provincial unions to act. The document makes clear that the sport’s hold on New Zealand is imperilled and the dysfunction between board, management and stakeholders has created an existential crisis.
Doing nothing is not an option although technically, with two-thirds of members needing to vote in any of these recommendations, it is.
Both the board and the provincial unions have put out statements today saying they are reviewing the contents.
In breaking down the report below, I have traversed some of its key findings. Wherever possible I will use the language of the report although it will be abridged, including the subject subheads. Any emphasis will be mine, and any observations I make will be in italics. Apart from that, the below is the work of the review, which you can access in full here.