Perfect is the enemy of good; or, to be precise, doesn’t exist.

Near to where I live, there is a house with a rather questionable architectural ‘feature’. It has a door that leads to a balcony — if you could even call it that — with only one guardrail. Below it is a 12-foot plunge to earth. It’s hard to explain. Take a look.

It’s an oddity, sure, but as I walked past it today it made me think of something that I’ve experienced a lot in my career: corporate (mis)conceptions of good governance. And this door depicts how I feel in general about corporate governance. Management culture, business schools, and ‘expert’ auditors all demand we produce monumental plans that predict the future and the mind-boggling permutations of variations that might eventuate. They erect barricades and gates to control activity and (particularly) spending. Getting through the door is often more difficult than the thing you’re actually trying to accomplish. And honestly, sometimes focusing on just getting through the door means you neglected to notice the massive drop you were walking towards in your quest for signatures on bits of paper.

That’s my view of corporate governance in general. It provides an illusion of ‘safety’ and attempts to insulate from the learning and growth opportunities that would increase resilience if it simply wasn’t there. It’s expensive, inefficient, disrupts flow, and doesn’t mitigate risk! It’s also the equivalent of telling teams — usually with a combined number of years of education running into the hundreds — that they are not trusted to know what to do; that they need to be ‘saved’ or ‘spared’ the unique thought-work that only a skilled managerial class can provide. It’s Industrial Age thinking; antiquated, condescending, myopic, patronising.

Of all the weird and not-so-wonderful practices of corporate management, the one that always gets me is a signed name on a piece of paper as a proxy that ‘governance’ has occurred. Articles and bills are inscribed into law with the flick of a wrist. It’s great as a piece of theatre, I suppose, but like a lot of human activity, rather absurd when you force yourself to think about it for more than a few seconds. What need are we fulfilling by signing things? Is it an emotional need, something to do with belonging, or being able to scrawl ‘I wuz ‘ere’ like a teenager on the train marking some temporary territory, inadvertently advertising their irrelevance?

The lazy suggestion would be that the signatory gets to feel a surge of ego simply by being ‘worthy’ and important enough to sign a piece of paper. But when I think more about it, and in my experience of seeing the signatures of 5 or sometimes more highly-remunerated individuals approving and deciding upon something that they in truth know very little about, the emotion I tend to experience is pity. Individual accountability must be a lonely existence, although in truth I’ve only seen it actually play out a few times. Misery loves company, so they say, but more importantly humans love company. Banding together as middle managers and demanding to sign-off on something is an almost natural trait, it would seem. It’s also completely the opposite of what accountability is supposed to be. So I’m leaving it open to interpretation here that where you see 5 middle managers as ‘Endorsers’ on a document; that’s some bullshit.

Corporate governance is the illusion of control. Recently I’ve been persuaded by Niels Pflaeging’s idea that there are in fact three sources of power in organisations, with the formal power structure — depicted in the hierarchical org chart — being only one. Ultimately, human beings are goal-seeking, desire purpose and want to make progress, so they tend to do what needs doing to get a result or outcome. This happens outside of pieces of paper, frameworks, methods, processes, and whatever else. Sometimes it happens in direct contravention of management’s efforts and the doors or gates they erect. Past those gates, and all the ‘perfect’ planning, you may just fall 12 feet into a world of pain anyway. That is the nature of complex systems. They will surprise you. They will mess you up. If you’ve been around the block a few times, you know this, and you stop trying to ‘guarantee’ safety.

So not only is it highly questionable that this style of governance in fact achieves higher quality or better outcomes, but it actively prevents your business from responding quickly to changing needs and environments. Risk averse governance, it turns out, ironically adds risk. By parsing all decision making through a complex process to people lacking the information and context they need to make good decisions, and hindered by all manner of personal politicking, regulations and compliance rules, it is completely unsurprising that we have the levels of workplace disengagement we have.

It’s my experience that talented humans, not systems of governance, achieve desirable outcomes. But because Management is a specialisation, managers are becoming less capable of recognising the actions that go unseen, and success is falsely attributed to ‘the process’, so people double down on it. A few years ago I had a jarring interaction with a Change Manager, who was pointing out, without a hint of irony, that since the introduction of strict environmental controls around software deployments, the number of ‘failed’ changes had stayed the same. This data was being used as an argument for MORE change control.

So what are the alternatives? This article has been a ‘what’ and ‘so what’ for the ‘now what’ that I would advocate. I will leave it to my colleagues in the course to outline the benefits of de-centralised decision-making, psychological safety, the advice process, consent decision-making, ranges of tolerance, integrative decision-making, guard rails and principles, sociocratic domains and other fantastic ideas. I’m just here to bear witness to the frustrations and disillusionment of the hundreds of eminently capable, talented and ingenious people I’ve worked with, whose ideas were ignored.