It’s been a busy half-term of finance work for me and here are the things that keep coming back around…
🔁 Numbers need narrative. Narrative needs numbers.
The two have to talk to each other and when they don’t, leaders end up guessing and pulling levers without really knowing what they’ll move. Numbers without narrative create noise. Narrative without numbers creates risk.
And that gap doesn’t close itself. Someone has to be able to translate the two into one story… and the conditions have to exist for that conversation to happen.
🧐 The “Chief” bit of Chief Finance Officer
The CFO role sits right at the heart of how a trust functions. And yet it’s often reduced to its technical requirements. The Academy Trust Handbook is clear that the CFO should play both a technical and a leadership role. In practice, it’s the leadership stuff that gets squeezed and in a system that loads so much onto compliance, that’s not surprising.
The ‘Chief’ part of the job is about seeing the whole organisation, understanding how money connects to what’s happening in schools and helping leaders make sense of consequences and compromises.
The CFOs who have the biggest impact build on accuracy and compliance to interpret, connect and translate. Because leadership starts where reporting ends.
Yes, accountancy qualifications and accreditations are essential when it comes to managing public money. But if finance leadership doesn’t move beyond the balance sheet, the sense-making still needs to happen somewhere.
When it doesn’t (and sometimes it doesn’t) that’s when it gets scary. Sometimes it’s a people thing. Sometimes it’s a systems thing. Sometimes it’s both.
🔎 Forecasting isn’t about prediction – it’s about preparedness
How an organisation approaches forecasting usually shows up exactly where the sense-making is and isn’t working. So much changes so often and so much is outside of our control that forecasting often feels like a finger-in-the-wind exercise.
But the real value of forecasting isn’t in being right. It’s in leaders working through different scenarios, seeing consequences earlier and having better conversations about what might happen next and how they might respond.
A forecast isn’t a promise or a crystal ball. It’s how you stress-test decisions before the pressure is on. In an uncertain system, planning isn’t about being certain. It’s about being ready. And that kind of readiness doesn’t happen by accident – it’s what good finance leadership looks like in practice.
🤔 A closing thought
Here’s what I keep coming back to: who in your organisation is doing the sense-making? And if you’re not sure, that gap is probably costing you more than you think.
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Source: AOB – My LinkedIn Newsletter