The Committee Room

Show Notes Three hours into the planning day, the committee has filled three sheets of butcher's paper with things to do — more events, new programs, a shiny new website. Then someone asks what the vision is. After a long silence, a brave soul offers a sentence packed with excellence, innovation and leveraging that nobody in the room can explain, including the person who said it. In the second epi...

Show Notes Six exhibitions, classes four nights a week, a brand new website and a grant application for a kiln. The arts centre committee in this week's cold open has had a huge year. But when the president sits down to write her annual report, she can list everything they did and not one thing it achieved. All hands on deck, and nobody steering the ship. So begins Planning With Purpose — and the...

Show Notes In this Halloween special, the Kates go monster hunting through the committee room. Zombie decisions, phantom members, ghost policies, Frankenstein constitutions and hollow financial reports — each one is a real governance problem with a real fix, from review dates and role descriptions to a policy register and a full set of reports. Every committee has a few monsters. The decision made...

Show Notes A budget built by adding a percentage to every line from last year looks sensible, gets approved, and still doesn't answer the questions that matter. What are we doing differently this year? Are membership numbers changing? Is there a new program, or something that's about to need replacing? Kate Hartwig and Kate McPhee call it the zombie budget — and this episode is about building the...

Show Notes Your financial reports are telling you a story. Every month, three chapters land on your committee table — the Balance Sheet, the Profit and Loss, and the Cash Flow. Each one tells you something different about how the organisation is doing, and you need all three to see whether the plot is heading somewhere good or whether a villain has been quietly lurking in the numbers all along. In...

Show Notes The assumption that the Treasurer carries the financial responsibility so everyone else can relax is one of the most persistent and damaging myths in committee governance. It's wrong, and it costs organisations. This episode covers the myth of not-for-profit, what financial responsibility actually looks like for every committee member, what the Treasurer's role really is, the difference...

Whether you're managing a disciplinary matter, responding to a member complaint, or making a decision that affects someone's membership, the principles of natural justice apply — whether your Constitution mentions them or not. In this episode, a recently retired Magistrate explains what natural justice actually requires, why it's the process not the decision that determines whether you've got it r...

Show Notes Compliance failures are rarely dramatic. They're just things nobody wrote down and nobody was tracking — quietly unmet obligations sitting in the background until something outside the organisation triggers a very uncomfortable discovery. The goal of this episode isn't a mountain of paperwork. It's two practical tools: a Compliance Register and a Committee Calendar. Together they turn a...

Show Notes Changing a Constitution is not as difficult as it feels. The process has specific requirements — notice, approval threshold, registration — but none of them are insurmountable. What's more useful than knowing how to change the Constitution is knowing what should be in it in the first place, and what belongs somewhere else entirely. This episode covers both: the amendment process in plai...

Your Constitution is binding on every member of your organisation whether they've read it or not. That's not a technicality — it's the foundation of everything the committee does. This episode covers what a Constitution actually is, the three layers of what goes in it (mandatory, best practice and your own choices), the mandatory elements the Act requires, and the single most important thing about...

Show Notes The questions that keep coming in are proof that the situations committees face are remarkably consistent across organisations of all kinds — and that most people are navigating them without much support. In this second Your Questions Answered episode, the Kates work through eight more real questions: from the committee member who won't stop sharing confidential information, to the mana...

A requisition arrives on the Secretary's desk — twenty-two financial members requesting a Special General Meeting. The President's first instinct is to ignore it. The Secretary's first instinct is to panic. Neither is the right move. This episode covers what an SGM is, when members can call one, and how to handle it well. Show Notes A Special General Meeting called by members is uncomfortable. It...

Most AGMs bomb not because the organisation is failing but because the preparation wasn't done. The wrong people didn't know their roles. The constitution hadn't been checked. The annual report was written the week before by one person. Other Business opened and the meeting went off-script for forty minutes. None of that has to happen. In this episode, the Kates use the theatrical metaphor to show...

Show Notes Most committees treat minutes as an afterthought. Someone volunteers to take them, types up a rough summary, emails it around before the next meeting, and hopes for the best. But minutes are a legal document — and failing to keep proper ones is an offence under Australia's various Associations Incorporation Acts. This episode covers everything from what minutes actually are and where th...

Most committees don't avoid decisions because they're lazy or incompetent. They avoid them because they want consensus, they don't want conflict, and they keep hoping that if they wait long enough, everyone will come around. They won't. And in the meantime, the issue gets bigger and harder to deal with. This episode covers both sides of the decision-making problem: why committees avoid making call...

Show Notes You can have the best-prepared agenda in the world and still have a terrible meeting if nobody's running the room well. The chair's job is active, skilled and often underappreciated — and it's not just about following the agenda. This episode covers start to finish: from the two non-negotiable basics (start on time, finish on time) through the chair's three core jobs, the formal rules o...

Show Notes All the good governance in the world only comes to life if your meetings work. And the work that makes a meeting run well happens days before anyone walks in the room. This episode kicks off the Smarter Meetings series with everything that needs to happen before the meeting starts — from the agenda structure that puts important things where they get proper attention, to the report forma...

Show Notes Succession planning and performance review sound like the kind of governance topics that get added to the agenda and then quietly moved to next meeting. This episode makes the case that they're not optional — and uses the most dramatic governance failure in European history to prove it. The good news is that the practical tools are straightforward: a skills matrix, an anonymous survey,...

Show Notes The questions that come up in committee rooms are remarkably consistent across organisations of all kinds. The secretary who takes biased minutes. The quorum that can never be reached. The long-serving leader who's not doing a bad job but nothing ever changes. In this episode, the Kates answer eleven listener questions directly — the situations people are navigating right now and aren't...

Show Notes Clarity about who can decide what isn't bureaucracy — it's how committees avoid expensive mistakes and missed opportunities in equal measure. A delegations register doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to exist, be accurate, and be known. This episode covers what goes in one, why the things that can't be delegated matter just as much as the things that can, and how to start if yo...

Show Notes Committee overload is one of the most common problems in volunteer organisations — and the answer isn't working harder, it's building smarter structures. Portfolios, subcommittees and working groups are three tools that every committee can use to share the workload, draw on skills from across the membership and free up committee meetings for the governance conversations that actually ma...

Episode Description You can run the best election process in the world and still have new committee members who are still finding their feet six months later. The difference between a new member who contributes from day one and one who takes half a year to get up to speed usually comes down to one thing: induction. Not a pile of documents — a proper process. In this episode, the Kates walk through...

Episode Description Most committees have a story like this one — the meeting where everyone noticed something and nobody said a word. In this episode, Kate H and Kate M tackle the governance failure that hides in plain sight: the question that didn't get asked. They dig into why people stay quiet, what they should actually be asking across finance, risk and strategy, and how to build a committee c...

Episode Description The annual general meeting. Four usual suspects nominate each other, a hand shoots up from someone nobody recognises, and seven people are declared elected to enthusiastic silence. Sound familiar? In this episode, Kate and Kate explain why nominations from the floor are one of the worst things you can do for your organisation — and walk through the eight-step election process t...

Episode Description Care. Loyalty. Obedience. Three words that sound a bit like an old-fashioned wedding vow — but it turns out they're the foundation of every committee member's legal duties. In this episode, Kate and Kate unpack what those duties actually mean in practice, what happens when they're ignored, and why the reasonable person test is both the standard you're held to and genuinely your...