Governance redefined

Helping an organisation navigate life

Governance is, according to the Chartered Governance Institute of UK and Ireland, “a system that provides a framework for managing organisations.” Alternatively it is “the direct process by which owners’ agents exercise ownership prerogatives over the corporate enterprise.” according to corporate governance expert John Carver.

What does “governance” mean to you? I've been exploring and advising on organisational governance for over 20 years, yet recently it dawned on me that I don’t know what I'm talking about when I use the word. It has lost its meaning for me.

A glance online suggests I am not alone. It has been called a “ubiquitous buzzword that can mean anything or nothing” while one article identified nine different meanings of the word. Despite this I hear people use it with great conviction. What am I missing?

Words have power. They can be used to cast spells, hurled like weapons or serve as balm to soothe a wounded soul. It matters what words we use and the meaning we impart to them.

A deeper understanding of governance and its meaning, then, could be valuable for those of us seeking to nurture new style organisations that are regenerative and aim to serve all life.

Governing for life

“Governance” usually implies a desire for control, with the aim of promoting order and compliance. It is typically wielded by someone either outside, or high up in, an organisation. A remote owner, say, who wants to extract steady revenue streams, or a funder or regulator seeking reassurance. Or it might be a trustee looking to shape the organisation.

But what if you are not seeking control, but rather the health of the organisation and its wider eco-system? What if you want to govern in order to help the entity prosper in a way that benefits everyone involved? What if, in short, you don’t want anything from the organisation, but rather something for it and its community.

Governance, then, can be about using power and influence to promote the health of the organism. Governance as an act of love! Love in this context means to seek the healthy growth and evolution of the whole organisation/organism.

This may sound extreme or fanciful. But organisations are made up of people. Why shouldn’t we show love to an organisation just as we might to a person? I think of this as “governing for life”.

I am reminded of the way my wife, a holistic healer, treats her clients. She looks at the whole person, including their surrounding family and community, aiming to support their growth into a whole functioning person. Aiming for complete unity of mind, body and spirit may be an unachievable goal, but it provides a vital direction for the work.

This leads me to suggest a new definition of governance for a regenerative mindset.

A new definition of governance

Governance is an activity whose aim is the harmonising and integration into one functioning whole of all the qualities and functions of the organisation.

Underlying this definition is an attitude:

• treat an organisation as a multi-dimensional and sovereign being, a living thing with a life of its own. This is the perspective of author and organisational theorist Peter Senge, who wrote, “[Do] we think life starts and ends with us? Surely, simpler organisms are alive. Why then, can’t we regard more complex organisms, like families or societies or companies, as being alive as well?”
• pay particular attention to relationships between parts rather than focusing on the parts themselves.
• seek to understand the deeper purpose of the organisation — its place in the wider eco-system — and align the organisation around that; and
• view the work of governance as a journey that may never truly end.

This attitude invites a holistic perspective that incorporates all the various parts and energies of the organisation, including physical assets, money, information flows, the humans working in or around the organisation, leadership and ways of working.

It views life as essentially uncontrollable and considers attempts to control it as generally harmful. It acknowledges complexity and emergence, and encourages us to go beyond logic and draw on our imagination and intuition. Thus we make space for wildness and unpredictability, an essential ingredient of life.

A profane look at sacred cows

Adopting this perspective invites us to re-consider some sacred cows of modern organisational governance. For example, ownership. Can ownership contribute to the deeper purpose of the organisation? If so, perhaps it needs to look more like “trusteeship”, where power is held for the benefit of others. There are many examples of this, including Riverford Organic Farmers and other companies whose shares are held for employees, and outdoor recreation retailer Patagonia which is “owned” for the benefit of the earth.

Another pillar of mainstream governance is the board of directors, which usually assumes a central function of controlling the organisation. What if instead we conceive of the board as one part of the system, and not necessarily the most important? Adopting this approach, some companies have created a “minimum viable board” whose role and powers are tightly defined — you can find examples in this article. Others have several “boards”, which interact in complex ways; retailer John Lewis for example, and eco-car company Riversimple. These “polycentric” (to use the word of the late great Elinor Ostrom) organisations start to look more like democracies than the centrally managed autocracies we are familiar with.

I am excited to see the new thinking emerging in the space of governance. My dream is that a renewed understanding of governance can liberate the people within organisations, so that all can thrive. We, and our organisations, deserve no less.

Acknowledgement: In reflecting on governance of an organisation, I was inspired by the work of Roberto Assagioli, founder of the school of psychology “Psychosynthesis”. He described the possibility of progressive integration of the human personality, which helped inspire my thoughts about the true aims and attitude of governance. In developing my definition, I adapted language from his book (Psychosynthesis, 1977).