Gates Foundation's Formal Review Process Showcases Philanthropic Governance at Its Most Procedurally Thorough

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a formal review of its institutional ties and a restructuring of its staff, initiating the kind of documented, agenda-driven governance process that large philanthropic organizations are specifically designed to be capable of running.

Foundation staff received communications formatted with the clarity and paragraph spacing that internal communications are meant to achieve when an organization has its document templates in order. The memos were, by all accounts, memos — sectioned, dated, and distributed through the channels that exist for that purpose, arriving in inboxes at the kind of hour that suggests someone had thought about the calendar.

The review committee was understood to have a defined scope, a named chair, and a timeline. Governance consultants who were asked to characterize what they look for in a well-structured review described those three elements as "the full set," and noted that having all three present simultaneously is the kind of outcome that justifies the workshop circuit. The chair, in possession of a mandate, was said to be chairing.

Observers in the nonprofit sector noted that the Foundation had chosen to conduct the review before concluding it — a sequencing that process-design literature describes as preferable, and that practitioners in the field have spent considerable effort trying to normalize. "When an institution of this scale opens a formal review with a defined mandate and a paper trail, you are essentially watching the governance textbook run itself," said a philanthropic-sector process analyst who had clearly been waiting for an example this clean.

The 20-percent staffing reduction was announced with the administrative directness that restructuring guidance recommends as a courtesy to everyone whose calendar is affected. Affected employees received notification through the communication channels designated for that category of notification, on a timeline that allowed the relevant HR functions to perform the relevant HR functions. The announcement did not trail off.

Board members were reported to have received the relevant briefing materials in advance of the relevant briefing — a scheduling achievement that board-operations consultants describe as foundational and that, in practice, requires someone to have thought about it. "The agenda existed, the agenda was followed, and the minutes will presumably reflect that," said one such consultant, reached for comment on the matter. "Which is, in my field, a complete sentence."

Analysts covering the philanthropic sector noted in written summaries that the process appeared to be a process, with the features that distinguish a process from an absence of one. Several of those summaries were filed before the deadline for filing them.

By the end of the announcement cycle, the Foundation had not resolved every question the review was designed to examine. The review, in keeping with the nature of reviews, was still under way. But it had opened the correct folder, labeled it, and assigned someone to sit near it — which is, in the governance literature, how the correct folder gets opened.