20 Years of Governance Lessons

Twenty years in governance have surfaced a few lessons worth passing on. These are the five that keep coming up.

Streamline Governance

Frameworks and committees are supposed to enable operations, not encumber them. When they become an end in themselves — an ever-growing paper trail of policies no one reads and committees no one chairs — governance stops adding value and starts extracting it.

The test is simple: does the framework help decisions get made, or does it slow them down? A well-designed governance system makes boards more efficient, not less; it clarifies who decides what, at what threshold, and with what information. It protects scale by making sure structures grow with the organisation rather than lagging behind or overtaking it.

If your board spends more time on process than on substance, the framework is not working.

Prioritise Real Resilience

Compliance on paper and resilience in practice are different things. An organisation can meet every regulatory requirement, complete every audit checklist, and still fail when tested — because the real protection is not in the documents, it is in how decisions are actually made and challenged under pressure.

Real resilience shows up in three places: the quality of information boards get when things go wrong, the speed at which bad news travels upwards, and the willingness of those in the room to disagree well. Boards that pass the paper compliance test but fail on any of these three are more exposed than they think.

Ask yourself: how would our decision-making hold up in a genuine crisis?

Remove the Friction

Unclear delegations, overlapping committees, decisions that need three sign-offs when they should need one, quietly slows an organisation down. It is rarely dramatic; it just wastes time, blurs accountability, and creates space for risks to grow unnoticed.  This is structural friction.

The board’s job is to see this and address it. Not by adding more process, but by removing what is not working. That means periodically reviewing whether committee remits still make sense, whether authority levels match how the organisation actually operates, and whether reporting flows give the board the information it needs at the point of decision.

Small changes here often unlock significant improvement because boards usually under-invest in this area.

Develop the Board

Boards, like organisations, need to develop. The composition, skills mix, and dynamics that served the last strategic cycle may not serve the next. Waiting until problems become visible is waiting too long.

Independent Board evaluations are the mechanism for spotting this early. Done well, they surface where oversight is thinning, where succession risks are building, and where the board’s collective capability needs strengthening. Done as a compliance exercise, they produce reports no one acts on.

The UK Corporate Governance Code recommends externally facilitated evaluations every three years for listed companies; the underlying principle — periodic, honest self-examination — applies to every board serious about performing well.

Boards that don't evaluate themselves usually can't see why they should.

Ensure Practical Accountability

Regulatory rules exist to protect stakeholders, but they only work when translated into decisions people can actually make. Frameworks that sound comprehensive in theory but confuse in practice provide no protection at all; they just create the illusion of one.

The best governance advisors — and the best General Counsels — translate the technical detail into practical decisions. Not diluted, not oversimplified, but rendered in language a board can act on. This is where legal expertise meets executive judgement, and where governance moves from box-ticking to protection.

If your board knows about the regulation but can't say what to do about it, the translation isn't finished.