Insight
Governance Grows in the Gap
No organization decides to become heavily governed. There is no meeting where somebody proposes adding four forums and a monthly review, and everyone agrees that sounds efficient.
What happens instead is that a decision goes wrong, or nearly does, and nobody can say who should have made it. So a forum is created — reasonably, by capable people, to make sure that particular thing does not happen again. It works. And it works in a way that removes the pressure to answer the question underneath it, which was never how do we review this but who owns this.
Do that eight times over four years and you have a governance layer nobody designed, each piece of it defensible, the whole of it expensive.
The tell is that governance grows in proportion to the ownership gap, not to the risk. Two organizations facing identical risk will carry wildly different amounts of process, and the difference is almost always how clearly each one can name an owner. Where ownership is unmistakable, the forum has nothing to compensate for and quietly stops being scheduled.
Which is why removing governance from an organization that still cannot name owners produces no speed at all. The friction was never the forum. The forum was the organization’s attempt to survive the friction, and taking it away leaves the same gap with less protection around it.
Every one of those forums consumes capacity that was hired to create value. Not dramatically — an hour here, a two-week wait there — and never on a line anyone reviews.
Settle the ownership and the governance becomes redundant on its own. That is the rarest thing in organizational change: a subtraction with nothing to put in its place.