36 C O N T E X T 1 4 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 5 Director’s cut Still looking upwards and outwards Implementation of our corporate plan being the challenge, Romania offered the IHBC – in the form of our now president (and former education secretary) David McDonald, and myself – a special opportunity to look further afield for guidance, inspiration, support and information on how better to do our jobs in the UK. Critical, too, was the value that the IHBC has long attached to looking beyond our collective comfort zones, and indeed our personal ones, for new ideas and inspiration. As an institute the ambition to improve through exploring new approaches, learning and ideas – looking upwards and outwards – has been a central, if sadly less familiar, tradition in our history. Our strategy has always relied on exploring and – where suited – adopting or adapting the ideas of others. For any who care to remind themselves of the corresponding conservation practice explored in an earlier Director’s cut, this is just another manifestation of conservation bricolage: here with the IHBC as the bricoleur of corporate planning. Indeed, that predilection to learn from the practice and standards of others inspired the very foundation of the IHBC. Looking upwards and outwards, members of the Association of Conservation Officers were prompted to transform the ACO into a professional body – an ‘institute’ proper – inspired by what other such institutes did for their respective disciplines. Recasting the ACO as the IHBC started us on a lonely journey to establish a revolutionary new way to support specialist practice: regulating and accrediting the interdisciplinary skills that underpin built and historic environment conservation practice. But the core inspiration came from outside the association. No less ambitious in light of the paucity of funds then available – but no less informed by experience from elsewhere – was the next major corporate decision: to recruit professional staff. That led to the appointment of the first formal employee of the institute, myself, as director, in 2004-05. In the absence of the kind of support from national bodies that comparable professional bodies enjoyed, this evolution depended entirely on a successful increase in member subscriptions. That these initiatives received a nearunanimous vote of collective confidence directly from the pockets of members showed that not only the IHBC council, but the members as whole, could recognise the value of learning from the experience of others. Similarly, it was soon recognised that, again despite limited funds, additional staff could add capacity as well as enhance services. First Fiona Newton was recruited to deliver project work that would benefit from being informed by our members’ knowledge, while later Kate Kendall was appointed as our LETS (branch support and outreach) officer to support our volunteers, their colleagues, and build connections and synergies with the wider sector. The tradition of enthusiastic learning from others also manifested itself in the time, effort and energy we invested in exploring the working environment of our burgeoning institute. Much of time in the early days in my post was spent looking at the potential of partnership – and even merger – with professional bodies that more effectively mapped to and benefitted from heritage agency interests, funding and support, notably Icon and what is now the CIfA. Looking upwards and outwards, no possibility was excluded, even if in all options it was clear in the end that the ostensible benefits were effectively outweighed by operational impracticalities. For example, when we looked at consolidating accreditation with the conservators, Icon, for all the shared structural similarities in our accrediting processes, the simple fact that our members were not able to control the conservation process in a way comparable to conservators meant that respective members were, in reality, far apart in the fundamentals of any unified accreditation process. Looking for inspiration is not enough: you need to make the right decisions too, decisions that are the best they can be precisely because they are fully informed and balanced. That willingness to explore alternative ways of doing things is represented most recently by the establishment of our ‘Council+’. This is the extended, UK-wide advisory platform established as part of a programme to modernise our governance, supplementing the skills and input into our operating infrastructure and our national forward
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