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CPD EP27 - When Mission Meets Reality: Resilience and Leadership in a Transforming Charity with Angela McConville
Updated: 7 days ago
Why Resilience Is About More Than Surviving Disruption
Resilience is often described as an organisation's ability to withstand disruption. Boards invest in business continuity, crisis management and operational resilience capabilities, hoping these frameworks will prepare them for the next major event.
But disruption rarely creates resilience.
More often, it reveals whether an organisation has already developed the leadership, culture and adaptability needed to respond.
That became one of the strongest themes in my conversation with Angela McConville, formerly Chief Executive of the National Childbirth Trust (NCT). Angela joined the organisation just ten weeks before the first Covid lockdown. Almost overnight, she found herself leading a charity whose services, income and community impact depended upon bringing expectant parents together in person, precisely when that became impossible.
The obvious story is one of digital transformation.
The more interesting story is one of organisational reinvention.
Throughout our discussion, Angela returned to a simple but powerful idea: an organisation's purpose should remain constant, but almost everything else should be open to challenge. That distinction is becoming increasingly relevant for leaders across every sector.
Purpose Should Stay Constant. Operating Models Shouldn't.
Many organisations unconsciously confuse their purpose with the way they currently deliver it.
Successful products, services and operating models gradually become part of the organisation's identity. Over time, assumptions become accepted truths, protected because they have historically worked rather than because they continue to reflect the world around them.
NCT experienced exactly this challenge. For decades, face-to-face support had been central to helping new parents. The pandemic forced the organisation to test that assumption. What emerged was not simply an alternative delivery channel, but a broader understanding that digital engagement could sometimes provide earlier intervention, greater accessibility and different forms of connection than previously thought possible.
The lesson was not that technology replaced human interaction.
It was that purpose remained unchanged even when the operating model evolved.
This is a challenge every leadership team should periodically revisit.
Questions for boards and executive teams:
Are we protecting our purpose or our current operating model?
Which assumptions have become accepted simply because they have worked historically?
If we were designing the organisation today, what would we do differently?
Why Organisational Learning Has Become a Strategic Capability
One of Angela's most interesting observations was that execution itself had never been NCT's greatest challenge.
The greater challenge was recognising that the organisation needed to continually relearn how to understand the people it existed to serve.
Parents' expectations, behaviours and sources of information were changing rapidly. Rather than assuming those needs remained constant, the organisation deliberately became more curious, particularly about families who were not engaging with its services.
That shift from confidence to curiosity changes how organisations approach transformation.
Instead of attempting to eliminate uncertainty, NCT embraced experimentation through small, low-cost tests that generated rapid feedback. One initiative failed quickly, yet the team celebrated the outcome because it had prevented greater investment in the wrong direction.
In increasingly uncertain environments, organisations should not simply ask:
"How well are we executing?"
They should also ask:
"How quickly are we learning?"
Listening Creates Organisational Awareness
Leadership teams have never had access to more information.
Yet many organisations still find themselves surprised by issues that, in hindsight, had been developing for months.
Why?
Because information and organisational awareness are not the same thing.
Angela distinguishes between structured listening through governance, reporting and surveys, and unstructured listening through conversations with practitioners, volunteers and communities.
Many of the most valuable insights never appear first in dashboards.
They emerge through recurring conversations, observations and instinctive concerns that have yet to become measurable.
The emergence of birth trauma as a national issue illustrates this perfectly. Initially, practitioners working in different communities noticed similar experiences among the families they supported. Individually, these observations appeared localised. Collectively, they revealed a much broader issue that ultimately informed national debate and changes in support services.
Leadership's role was not simply collecting information.
It was recognising that separate observations were describing the same emerging challenge.
Resilience Depends on Empowerment, Not Control
Periods of uncertainty often encourage organisations to centralise decision-making.
Angela offers a different perspective.
Rather than concentrating authority, she describes the role of leadership as creating the conditions for good decisions to be made throughout the organisation.
For NCT, that means central teams simplifying regulatory complexity, providing guidance and equipping practitioners closest to families with the confidence and capability to act.
The same principle extends beyond organisational boundaries.
Reflecting on NCT's work alongside other charities during the UK Covid Inquiry, Angela described how collaboration amplified impact far beyond what individual organisations could have achieved alone.
As societal challenges become increasingly interconnected, resilience depends not only on strengthening organisations individually but also on strengthening the ecosystems within which they operate.
Leadership Reflection: Reinvention Is the Price of Remaining Relevant
As NCT celebrates its seventieth anniversary, Angela reflected on what resilience means today that it did not five years ago.
Her answer was simple.
Reinvention.
Not reinvention for its own sake, but the willingness to continually rethink how the organisation delivers its mission while remaining true to why it exists.
That may be the most important lesson from our conversation.
The organisations most likely to remain resilient will not necessarily be those that protect today's operating model most effectively.
They will be those with the courage to challenge their assumptions, remain deeply curious about the people they serve, learn faster than the environment changes and continually reinvent themselves without ever losing sight of their purpose.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
More about the interview with Angela McConville
How do leaders keep an organisation true to its purpose while continually reinventing how that purpose is delivered?
In this CPD episode of the RiskMasters Podcast, I speak with Angela McConville, formerly Chief Executive of the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), about leadership, organisational resilience and transformation in one of the UK's largest charities.
Angela joined NCT just ten weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally disrupted how the organisation supported parents. Overnight, a charity built around bringing expectant parents together in local communities had to rethink how it delivered its services, maintained financial sustainability and continued fulfilling its mission.
Rather than focusing solely on crisis management, our conversation explores what enables organisations to adapt continuously in an increasingly uncertain environment.
Although the discussion is rooted in the charity sector, the lessons extend far beyond it. Whether you lead a charity, financial institution, healthcare provider, public sector organisation or commercial business, this conversation offers practical insights into leadership, organisational resilience, governance, strategic decision-making and organisational transformation in an increasingly uncertain world.
🎯 What You Will Learn
By listening to this episode, you'll gain practical insights into:
Building organisational resilience through leadership rather than crisis response.
Challenging assumptions that have become embedded within successful organisations.
Using experimentation and rapid learning to improve strategic decision-making.
Creating cultures where curiosity is encouraged and learning is celebrated.
Strengthening organisational awareness through frontline intelligence.
Recognising emerging risks before they become measurable.
Balancing governance, regulation and organisational agility.
Empowering distributed teams while maintaining effective oversight.
Using collaboration as a strategic capability rather than simply a partnership model.
Reinventing an organisation without compromising its purpose.
🕒 Episode Highlights
00:00 – When resilience becomes a leadership challengeAngela reflects on joining NCT just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic and leading an organisation through immediate disruption.
04:00 – Protecting the mission, not the operating modelWhy organisations must distinguish between their purpose and the way they currently deliver it.
08:00 – Learning faster than circumstances changeHow experimentation, rapid learning and celebrating small failures strengthen organisational resilience.
14:00 – Understanding changing customer needsWhy successful organisations continually challenge their assumptions about the people they serve.
18:00 – Why leaders should communicate purpose, not simply processHelping people understand why change matters rather than overwhelming them with operational detail.
22:00 – Structured and unstructured listeningHow organisational awareness develops through formal governance and everyday conversations.
27:00 – Weak signals and emerging strategic risksRecognising patterns before they become measurable issues, illustrated through NCT's experience of identifying birth trauma as an emerging national concern.
34:00 – Enabling rather than controllingWhy resilient organisations empower frontline teams rather than centralising decision-making.
39:00 – Collaboration as a resilience capabilityHow working across organisational boundaries can amplify both influence and social impact.
43:00 – Reinvention and the future of leadershipWhy resilience ultimately depends upon continually rethinking how organisations fulfil their mission.
💡 Key Insight
Throughout the discussion, five leadership principles emerged.
Purpose provides stability while operating models continue to evolve.
The assumptions organisations stop questioning often become their greatest source of fragility.
Learning quickly is increasingly more valuable than waiting for certainty.
Leadership depends on creating environments where weak signals can surface and be connected.
Resilient organisations continually reinvent themselves while remaining true to their mission.
🎧 Listen now on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/riskmasters-trailblazing-risk-leadership/id1709495792?i=1000794605310
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3G3HSMOmZbF7ByyAMmscba?si=ec5c7cd5419e46eb
Other platforms available
👤 About Angela McConville
Angela McConville was at the time of the interview Chief Executive of the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), one of the UK's largest parenting charities supporting families through pregnancy, birth and early parenthood.
Since joining NCT in 2020, Angela has led the organisation through a significant period of transformation, overseeing its response to the Covid-19 pandemic while modernising service delivery, strengthening organisational resilience and ensuring the charity continues to meet the evolving needs of families across the UK.
Her leadership spans charity governance, organisational transformation, strategic leadership, operational resilience, service innovation and collaboration, with a strong focus on creating organisations that learn, adapt and continue delivering lasting social impact.
Angela on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelamcconville/
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