The governance slide is a customary part of every transformation program charter. It appears near the end of the presentation — mostly to be received rather than interrogated.
It passes without contest, or at most some suggestions on names to be included, seldom who to exclude, in the governance structure. It does this partly through familiarity — three boxes, three frequencies, multiple arrows pointing upward, a structure that resembles what everyone has seen before — and partly through the comfort of its deliverables.
A governance structure, once approved, demands tangible evidence of its own existence: calendar invites to meetings that include everyone who carries influence over the program, whether or not they hold direct accountability for it; minutes that record discussions and file them; status reports that confirm the forum met and the slides were presented. These artefacts are not nothing. They create a paper trail. They satisfy assurance requirements. They give the impression that the program is being watched.
The question the slide does not invite — and that the room has rarely developed the habit of asking — is whether any of this watching actually governs anything.
What Governance Actually Is
Governance is not a structure to be designed and filed. It is a set of acts — best described in verbs — that either happen or do not.
Every governance tier shares three universal acts regardless of its level. It must decide — not note, not discuss, not explore, but reach a conclusion with a named owner and a committed date. At every meeting, it must account for what it decided at the last. And it must communicate conclusions precisely enough that they survive interpretation by people who were not in the room. When a forum notes rather than decides, the verb has changed. So has the nature of what is happening. The verb is the test.
Besides, the verbs to be part of three tiers include
Steering Committee — Sensing · Legitimising · Protecting · Re-calibrating.
Senses shifts in the external environment before they reach the program team. Legitimises the program's mandate in forums it cannot access. Protects the conditions the program needs — shielding it from shifting organisational priorities. And re-calibrates: this is the only tier with the standing and perspective to ask whether the governance design itself remains fit as the program evolves.
Program Review — Surfacing · Prioritising · Redirecting.
Surfaces uncomfortable variance early enough for corrective action to still matter — not after it has been managed locally for weeks and arrived upward already softened. Prioritises when demands exceed capacity. Redirects — issues corrective action, resolves the impasses the Core Team could not, and re-establishes what the next period must deliver.
Core Team — Executing · Flagging · Integrating.
Executes against the integrated plan. Flags problems before local workarounds begin to disguise systemic risk. Its meeting has failed when it becomes a status report. It is working when it is a short, honest, forward-looking account of what is committed and what stands in the way.
The Assumptions Behind the Slide — and What Needs Contesting?
Governance does not fail because the design is wrong. It fails because the design mistakes a simplification for a reality — and no one takes responsibility for managing the distance between them.
There are five assumptions about the operating context and human that need reality test:
Assumption 1 — Issues arrive pre-classified and can be cleanly routed to the appropriate tier.
Reality: They cannot. Issues exist on a continuum. A decision about delaying a workstream by two weeks is simultaneously operational in execution terms, tactical in resource terms, and strategic in stakeholder-signalling terms. What gets decided where, needs to be guarded to avoid extremes in terms of all decisions seen important enough to rise to the top or left to core team to guess.
Assumption 2 — Each tier's information needs are fully met by what rises from the tier below.
Reality: This is a structural conflict of interest. The people producing the information are also the people being evaluated by it. When independent information accountability is absent, governance is not receiving filtered information — it is governing with structural blind spots that no amount of honest reporting from below can fill. Each tier has independent information obligations of its own to add to what comes from below.
Assumption 3 — A scheduled meeting cadence is an adequate decision mechanism.
Reality: It is not. Critical issues arise between sessions. When governance has no out-of-cycle mechanism, they are either resolved informally — by whoever is available, without the right authority — or deferred until delay becomes damage. This is an architectural gap, not a behavioural one. Every governance design needs a named escalation mechanism: a specific trigger, a named person, a defined timeline. The structure existed. The escalation discipline did not.
Assumption 4 — Consequential conversations happen inside governance forums.
Reality: They happen before them. Positions are pre-negotiated in bilaterals. Coalitions form across tiers between meetings. This is not a governance failure — it is organisational life. The question is whether the formal structure retains enough clarity in its decision rights to remain the legitimate site of consequential decisions, or gradually becomes the place where predetermined conclusions are given procedural cover. Governance that has lost that legitimacy is still meeting. It has stopped mattering.
Assumption 5 — All participants are equally committed to the structure, regardless of seniority, style, or culture.
Reality: Culture, hierarchy, and organisational history do not disappear because a charter has been signed. The most important variable in any governance system is the behaviour of the most senior person in the room. A governance structure that does not account for the specific leadership style and cultural context of its most senior participants — designing around them, not despite them — is a structure that will gradually become whatever those leaders are most comfortable with.
When the Mechanism Needs Reviewing?
Governance is designed at inception and then treated as settled infrastructure. It is not. There are several signals to infer that governance is failing — and when those signals appear, they call for review without waiting for permission or a convenient moment on the calendar.
The signals are observable and specific.
- Key participants begin missing meetings or sending proxies without explanation — not once, but as a pattern.
- Decisions made in one forum are revisited in the next without new information, suggesting that the first forum lacked the authority or the confidence to make them stick.
- The same category of issue appears on the agenda at all three tiers simultaneously, which means it has not found its appropriate level and the tiers have not been able to route it.
- Commitments made in governance forums are quietly skipped and no one surfaces the breach.
- Escalations arrive late — after the decision window has passed — because the escalation mechanism has no teeth or the culture has learned not to use it.
- Participants arrive without preparation, treating attendance as presence rather than engagement.
- The minutes record discussion rather than decisions. The information pack looks the same at every tier, compressed rather than differentiated.
The astute architect does not explain them away — they name them, and they convene the people with the authority to redesign what is no longer working.
There is a second, distinct trigger that is almost universally overlooked. When the chair changes at any of the three tiers — when a new Steering Committee sponsor is appointed, when the program director is replaced, when the Core Team lead moves on — the governance mechanism should be explicitly re-endorsed, not passively continued.
A governance structure designed around one chair's style, instincts, and relationships does not transfer automatically to their successor. The incoming chair brings a different risk appetite, a different relationship with the tiers above and below, and a different understanding of what the forum is for. If the mechanism is not reviewed and re-endorsed with their genuine understanding and commitment — not merely their presence in the next meeting — it will operate on assumptions that no longer hold, governed by a design built for a person who is no longer there.
Leadership change at any tier is a governance reset moment. Treating it as one is the difference between a governance structure that adapts and one that drifts.
When next time the slide appears?
The governance slide deserves to be designed, not just drawn. Designing it means answering, before approval, the questions the room has learned not to ask: What specific class of decisions belongs to each tier — not as a principle but as a written list? What is the out-of-cycle escalation mechanism when an issue cannot wait? What independent information obligation does each tier carry beyond what the tier below provides? And who is responsible for calling a review of the governance design itself when it is no longer working?
It’s worth spending time on this slide, even if it appears late in the show!
This article is part of the PEACE Framework Reflection Series — a set of independent pieces on transformation leadership, each taking one theme and allowing deeper reflection.
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