Minimum Viable Governance

The quickest way to make sure nothing gets governed is to insist on governing everything.

A new technology arrives somewhere, and somebody quite reasonably says there need to be rules. The rules get drafted, and because nobody wants to be the person who missed something important, the rules keep expanding. By the time the policy is finished, it runs to forty pages, requires six approvals per decision, and presumes a kind of organisational capacity that nobody involved actually has. The document becomes the ceiling on what the team can do, and the team, who still have to deliver something, quietly develops a parallel set of practices that route around the rules. The governance framework is real. The compliance is theatre. The actual decisions are happening elsewhere, unobserved.

The answer is not to have no rules. The answer is to start with the smallest set of rules that plausibly catches the real problems, and then add only when the evidence says to. This is the principle behind minimum viable governance. It treats governance itself as a product that has to be fit for purpose, rather than as a statement of values everyone will nod at and then ignore. The tricky part is that minimum viable sounds lazy, and the political economy of any organisation rewards the person who wrote the forty-page document, not the person who wrote the sensible six-page one. So the forty-page document keeps getting written. And the actual governance keeps being absent. When you think of a rule that everyone in your organisation knows is not actually being followed, what would it look like to replace it with a shorter rule that was?

Last week we said yesterday's rules do not catch tomorrow's failures. This week we look at the temptation to govern everything at once and at why doing so usually means governing nothing.