The board decided to embark on the transition pathway towards closing Lankelly Chase in June 2022.

 

This was the culmination of  series of board conversations about how and whether Lankelly’s form could ever be squared with its function. The idea that the institution would eventually need to dissolve had been in the ether in different ways for a long time, in team conversations and in dialogue with grantees. It was seen by many as the logical continuation of the foundation’s work to cede power. However, the period following the actual decision was difficult, with strained relationships and trust. With the benefit of hindsight, these are some things we suggest are worth paying attention to for anyone else contemplating a big strategic shift like ours. (‘We’ in the context of this article is the Transition Leadership Team or TLT).

Our intention was to be transparent and make sure nothing was kept from people in the team in real time. This meant that we didn’t always take enough time to anticipate how an important conversation in the team might play out, what might be needed to hold it well and how people might feel. With hindsight, we overestimated how ready the team were for the decision. Significant meetings set the tone for a long time.

 

The support from external consultants journeying alongside was invaluable to the TLT. They had some distance from the internal dynamics and the day-to-day work that everyone else inevitably got caught up in at times. They could ground their insights and observations fully in the future intention and strategic direction. In retrospect, we would say more of this kind of capacity was needed.

Our struggles with our internal practice really showed up in this period. We’ve discussed the issues we had with whether the organisation should have a ‘core curriculum’ (who gets to decide what’s included?) and an agreed set of organisational practices for working things through, making decisions, handling disagreement and resolving conflict. We’ve also talked about the pros and cons of Lankelly’s openness and the freedom the team had to pursue different lines of inquiry and different approaches. These things meant we did not have a shared practice which we could draw on to help us navigate this difficult period.

Our leadership capacity happened to be reduced at the time the decision was made, and in the following months. It took time to build a different kind of (transition) leadership team appropriate to the work in hand (i.e. with enough headspace built in to really focus on what the transition pathway work needed, rather than the work of running the organisation as it was).

 

We (the TLT) needed to build our own relationships – partly so we could support each other, but also so we could move as a unit and offer an aligned and clear message to the team – even if this was ‘we don’t know that yet’ or something that wasn’t welcomed. We needed to be close, but not closed off.

 

This period was tough for trustees too, and it was important for them to build their relationships in the face of challenge and pushback, which was inevitable.

 

With both leader groups, this relationship building needed to happen in a way that didn’t ‘other’ at a time when fully ‘seeing’ each other in the organisation became difficult. We found the ‘drama triangle‘ to be a useful resource.

Creating space for the new to emerge was extremely challenging. The pull of the work we were already involved in was very powerful and it took up almost of all our time. There was little headspace for the transition pathway work for quite a while – this had to be carved out very intentionally.

 

It’s worth saying that this pull wasn’t just in terms of time/capacity. The new work required an ‘ontological shift‘ and a shift in ‘mode’. It wasn’t mentally/emotionally easy to move between the ‘now’ work and the ‘futures’ work.

 

In addition, if Lankelly had been a transactional grant-maker it would be been much more straightforward to ethically disentangle ourselves. The team had been active protagonists in lots of the work, and actually stepping out was more emotionally, ethically and practically complicated than we anticipated.