Governance: Too Much or Too Little Will Kill Your Transformation
April 4, 2025
Ever found yourself in a meeting about meetings? It sounds like something straight out of a Dilbert cartoon, but it’s happened to me —and I recall one that was one of the most productive sessions I've had.
"A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours." - Milton Berle
We had been working on a complex project. We had all the right components: a clear vision, strong technical expertise, and adequate budget. Yet decisions were stalling, actions were slipping through cracks, and frustration was mounting across stakeholders.
The problem wasn't our strategy or capabilities—it was our governance. Our project meetings had become bloated with too many participants, unclear decision rights, and agendas that tried to cover everything for everyone. The result? Hours of discussion with minimal outcomes, decisions that took weeks instead of days, and a creeping sense that we were losing control of the initiative.
So, we called a meeting about our meetings. We reviewed our governance, identified bottlenecks, redefined roles, and streamlined our communication plan. A few weeks later, decision velocity had improved, the team was more satisfied, and we were making progress again.
This experience highlighted something I've seen repeatedly in transformation efforts: governance is often the silent killer—or enabler—of successful change. It's rarely featured in exciting transformation presentations or discussed in leadership blogs (this one being the exception!), yet it fundamentally determines whether your brilliant strategies and cutting-edge technologies will deliver value.
What is Governance in Transformation?
At its core, governance in business transformation is the system of direction, control, and accountability that ensures initiatives deliver their intended outcomes while managing risk appropriately. It's the framework that determines:
How decisions are made and by whom
How progress is measured and reported
How issues are escalated and resolved
How resources are allocated and managed
How risks are identified and mitigated
Governance isn't just bureaucracy (though it can degrade into that). When done right, it's the operating system for your transformation—the invisible structure that enables everything else to function effectively.
The Two Governance Failures
When governance goes wrong, it typically fails in one of two directions: over-governance or under-governance. Each creates distinct problems that can derail even the most promising transformations.
Over-Governance: Bureaucracy that Stifles Progress
Over-governance manifests as excessive controls, approval layers, and documentation requirements that slow everything to a crawl. I've seen transformations where:
Simple decisions required approval from five different committees
Teams spend more time preparing governance reports than doing actual work
Changes took so long to approve that they were obsolete by the time they were implemented
Meetings were scheduled with 30+ people, none of whom felt empowered to make decisions
This approach doesn't just slow things down—it actively damages your transformation. Innovation suffers as teams avoid suggesting changes that would trigger cumbersome governance processes. Agility becomes impossible when every pivot requires weeks of documentation and approvals. Eventually, your best people become demoralised and disengaged.
Under-Governance: Chaos that Leads to Failure
On the other end of the spectrum, under-governance creates a different set of problems. With insufficient oversight, transformations can veer off course without anyone noticing until it's too late.
Signs of under-governance include:
Unclear decision rights leading to either decision paralysis or contradictory directions
Scope that continuously expands without corresponding adjustments to timelines or resources
Dependencies that go unmanaged until they become critical blockers
Risks that remain unidentified or unmitigated until they become crises
Stakeholders who receive inconsistent or inadequate information about progress
What's particularly dangerous about under-governance is that problems can remain hidden until they're too large to address. Without appropriate check-ins and transparency, teams may report "green" status while fundamental issues fester beneath the surface. By the time the real situation becomes visible, options for correction are limited and costly.
What Governance Looks Like
I think governance often gets overlooked because, on the surface, it looks like mundane administration – emails, meetings, status reports, and project plans. These elements seem like bureaucratic necessities rather than strategic enablers, which is why many leaders delegate them or give them minimal attention.
But this is where the failure begins. These seemingly administrative activities form the system of your transformation. When done right, they create clarity, drive decisions, and maintain momentum. When done poorly, they waste time, create confusion, and slow progress to a crawl.
Your meeting cadence determines how quickly decisions get made. Your documentation approach affects whether people have the information they need when they need it. Your communication patterns either build alignment or create silos. Your escalation mechanisms either catch problems early or let them fester until they become crises.
The most successful transformations understand that these "administrative" elements aren't just overhead – they're the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. They don't require extensive bureaucracy, but they do require intentional design focused on enabling action rather than just recording it.
Minimum Viable Governance: The Target Zone
The sweet spot in transformation governance is what I call Minimum Viable Governance (MVG)—the lightest possible structure that still maintains control while maximising freedom to execute.
MVG provides:
Just enough control to keep the transformation on track
Just enough visibility to identify and address issues early
Just enough documentation to support decision-making and knowledge transfer
Just enough coordination to manage dependencies effectively
MVG is not about minimising governance for its own sake—it's about optimising the governance-to-execution ratio. Every hour spent on governance activities should deliver a multiple of that value in improved outcomes.
What makes governance "viable"? It must:
Enable rather than obstruct - Governance should accelerate decision-making, not slow it down.
Result in outcomes, not outputs - measure the results governance produces
Adapt to changing needs - As your transformation evolves, so should your governance approach.
Create clarity without complexity - Everyone should understand how decisions are made without needing a manual to navigate the process.
Three Tips to Achieve Minimum Viable Governance
How can transformation leaders assess whether they're achieving MVG? Here are three practical approaches:
1. Question Every Meeting and Document
For each governance element (meeting, report, approval process), ruthlessly ask:
What specific problem does this solve?
Who actually needs this and why?
What would happen if we simply stopped doing it?
Is there a simpler way to get the same result?
This isn't a one-time exercise. Make it a habit to regularly challenge your governance mechanisms. At one organisation, we reduced governance meetings by mapping each meeting to specific decisions it needed to produce. Many meetings were revealed to be information-sharing sessions that could be handled through other channels, allowing us to refocus remaining meetings on actual decision-making.
2. Track How Long Decisions Take
The speed of decision-making is often the clearest indicator of governance effectiveness. Start measuring:
Days between when a decision is needed and when it's actually made
Number of approvals required for common decisions
How often decisions get reopened or revisited
Whether decisions actually lead to the intended outcomes
For transformation initiatives, compare your decision cycles to your delivery cycles. If decisions take longer than the work they enable, your governance is likely out of balance.
3. Write It Down
Simply documenting your governance routines can be surprisingly powerful. Create a simple one-page overview of how decisions get made, who's responsible for what, and when key meetings happen.
This documentation serves multiple purposes. First, it makes the invisible visible - seeing your governance structure on paper often reveals unnecessary complexity or gaps that weren't obvious before.
Second, clear documentation eliminates time wasted explaining and re-explaining how things work. New team members can onboard faster, and everyone operates from the same understanding of how the transformation runs.
Finally, documented governance creates accountability. When roles and processes are explicitly defined rather than assumed, people are more likely to fulfil their responsibilities and raise issues when things aren't working.
Keep this documentation simple and visible. A complex governance manual that nobody reads defeats the purpose. Aim for clarity that enables action, not comprehensive documentation that gathers dust.
Finding Your Governance Sweet Spot
Effective governance isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. What works for a small product team won't work for an enterprise-wide transformation, and what's appropriate for a highly regulated industry might be overkill in a more flexible environment.
The key is intentionality. Instead of letting governance evolve organically (usually toward greater complexity), consciously design it to provide just what's needed—no more, no less.
Until next Friday, keep failing forward!
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