By Robin Fieth, Chief Executive, Building Societies Association. This article was first published in Society Matters magazine.

There never seems to be enough time at the Building Societies Conference to discuss all the delegates' excellent questions.

One of the beauties of having a conference app is that we can capture those questions and reflect on them in the weeks and months after the  Conference itself is all over. From the many questions asked during the opening plenary session this year, four stood out to me as being capable of sparking whole debates in their own right. So perhaps we can treat this article as a starter for ten, and then run each of the questions as an online discussion. Please do contribute to those debates.

1. Avoiding group think is clearly good in some ways, as it means we are not all wrong in the same way. But sometimes the majority view is a good one.  We all believe in votes for women nowadays for example. How can we tell the difference between the two situations?

Here’s a real cracker to start with. We (Society Matters readers and Building Societies Conference delegates) I am sure all do believe in votes for women. Sadly, that is still not a universal  view across the globe. The wider issues of women’s right, education, freedom and safety remain matters of concern in many countries and communities. As do the rights of minorities, migrants and refugees. The  freedoms and privileges we all enjoy are not inalienable rights, but need to be continually nurtured and  safeguarded. 

And that is where the danger of groupthink comes in. A strong voice or a dominant personality can all too easily build a personal following. Friends and colleagues from similar backgrounds, with similar education and life  experiences, tend to see things in similar ways.

Who sees both sides of the story? Who raises the red flag? Who protects us from the complacency that all is  well? This is as true around boardrooms as it is among regulators. And it is one of the reasons why we are so concerned, for example, that the early proposals for regulation of diversity and inclusion in the UK financial  services sector risk creating a narrow, tick-box approach unless very carefully nuanced. I was struck at a recent Women in Finance Charter event by the comments from one of our colleagues from the PLC world. Having  been successful in materially improving the gender diversity of their leadership team, they then realised that what they had actually achieved, was “to recruit the sisters of the brothers we already employed.”

2. What’s the one thing we are not currently talking about as leadership teams across the building society and credit union sector that we really should be?

Would that there were only one! When putting  together the programme for the Building Societies Conference,  we are deliberately looking ahead to some of the themes that we think are likely to be important for building society and credit union boards in the months and years ahead. Some are more closely policy related, such as  our panel discussions both last year and this on the PRA’s Strong and Simple programme; some are more  people oriented (diversity, equity and inclusion; engaging with Gen-Z); some again more technology focused – quantum computing last year, AI this year.