Governance is boring… really?
Let’s be honest: you’ve probably rolled your eyes when hearing the word governance.
We think of endless meetings, rigid processes, or consultants who complicate what should be obvious. Governance is a word that more often evokes paperwork than collective power.
And yet, it may be precisely because we don’t talk about it that so many organizations exhaust themselves by misunderstanding one another. Because governance is not a luxury reserved for large organizations. It is not technocratic jargon. And it is not a necessary evil once you become “too big.”
It is what allows a group of people to function as a society at work. And when it is well designed—alive, explicit, and evolutive—governance doesn’t get in the way. It enables.
The allergy to anything that looks like structure
In reality, talking about governance always means talking about structure, whether we like it or not. Because any form of governance takes shape through rules, roles, and processes—whether explicit or implicit.
In many organizations, as soon as words like structure, process, or rule are mentioned, faces tighten. The collective imagination immediately associates these words with rigidity, loss of autonomy, and bureaucracy.
That reaction is understandable: I’ve worked in organizations myself where procedures suffocated common sense.
So when we dream of a modern, agile, or “liberated” organization, the reflex is often to wipe the slate clean: remove hierarchy, lighten processes, encourage initiative. We believe that by removing rigidity, something fluid and human will naturally emerge. But instead, we end up creating chaos.
Structure is a false enemy
Removing structure without putting a new framework in place creates a vacuum. And that vacuum rarely fills with clarity or collective momentum. It fills with underlying tensions, confusion about who does what, and more or less unspoken power dynamics.
In incomplete transformations, the observation I often hear is: “Before, the boss made the call. Now everyone speaks, no one decides—everyone shares their opinion, and nothing moves forward.”
We thought we were freeing the organization by clipping the wings of hierarchy, and we discover something unsettling: freedom without structure is not autonomy—it’s anarchy. Structure was not the problem. In some cases, it was the very thing holding everything together.
Culture cannot compensate for the absence of structure
This is a common misunderstanding: as long as governance isn’t named, we believe it doesn’t exist. In reality, every organization has a way of operating — either explicit or implicit. In organizations where nothing is formalized, implicit culture governs. Unwritten rules, ingrained habits, and unclear zones of influence. And that’s where tensions arise: we no longer know who has authority over what, when to consult, when to decide.
Kindness has become the favorite alibi of organizations that don’t dare to set a clear framework.
The blurrier the framework, the more culture is asked to compensate. People are expected to self-regulate and constantly adjust—without being given the reference points to do so. And this creates fatigue and frustration.
Like that meeting where three people kept passing the decision back and forth, unsure who was actually legitimate to decide. “I thought it was you,” “No, I thought it was all of us…” The result: nothing was decided. Everyone left frustrated, with a sense of confusion—and no one named the real issue.
Behind a fluid and human-centered facade, old hierarchical patterns and power games still linger. And fundamental mechanisms to evolve roles, regulate tensions, and address real issues are often missing.
When structure becomes visible and explicit, culture can breathe—and relational energy is freed instead of being wasted patching the leaks of an absent framework.
What if governance were a necessary interface?
Changing perspective is already a shift in posture. Governance should not be seen as an administrative layer added on top of operations. It is the operating system.
Not a rigid instruction manual, but a necessary interface between individuals and the collective. A set of agreements, roles, processes, decision-making modes, and ways to regulate tensions. In short, the organic framework that allows an organization to evolve without falling apart.
In this view, governing is not about control. It’s about creating the conditions for people to act with discernment, within a clear, adaptable, shared framework. This isn’t about size or maturity: every team needs a minimum level of governance to decide, coordinate, and handle disagreements.
“Freeing structures by structuring freedoms”
This sentence has become something of a Paradigm21 slogan, because it’s away from dichotomies and extremes that a more mature, nuanced relationship to governance emerges.
No longer: structure = rigidity, freedom = chaos.
But rather: structure = support, freedom = discernment.
In other words: make structure evolutive, readable, and supportive—so that the freedom to act, decide, and propose becomes a lived reality. This means setting a framework clear enough so that freedom doesn’t turn into competition, paralysis, or fragmentation.
When tensions become drivers
As soon as governance becomes visible — even in simple, pragmatic ways — the effects are quickly felt.
Less mental load: everyone knows what falls within their role, what is expected of them, and what can be delegated or shared.
More real autonomy—not just an empty promise. Because autonomy doesn’t mean acting alone: it relies on clarity around roles, boundaries, and room to maneuver.
Decisions become more fluid: we know who decides, on what, and who to consult. And if a process no longer fits, it can be adjusted. Together.
And above all: fewer relational tensions. When the rules of the game are clear, there’s no need to interpret. We no longer need to sharpen our antennas to guess what’s really going on. We can talk about the framework—even disagree with it—without things becoming personal.
But the role of explicit governance doesn’t stop there. It doesn’t seek to eliminate tensions, but to make them visible and transformable. Because a tension, in itself, is not a problem. It’s information — a signal that a role, a rule, an interface, or a way of working could evolve. It’s an energy for movement — but one that needs a support to be expressed. That support is structure.
Tensions are the driving forces of change, and structure is the ground that makes change possible.
That’s why well-designed governance doesn’t freeze things. It evolves with what is trying to emerge. It captures weak signals and everyday frictions, and channels them to adjust the system, refine it, and make it more alive.
A living organization is not one that avoids tensions, but one that knows how to use them to grow.
Toward a structure in service of life
An organization is not a machine, but a living system, in constant interaction with its environment. That’s the difference between an organization designed as a stack of boxes and one thought of as an ecosystem. In a systemic approach, structure is not rigid—it’s a living architecture that allows interactions, learning, and adjustments to flow.
Structure must therefore be clear enough to support the system — and flexible enough not to constrain it. But it still needs to be adapted to the reality on the ground — not imposed from the outside. This is not about copying a “turnkey” model (holacracy, sociocracy, or any other), but about learning to structure organically, starting from what is already there: culture, tensions, real dynamics.
Sometimes it starts with a diagnosis: unclear roles or decisions that are stuck. Sometimes with experiments around feedback or collective decision-making.
A transformation process often consists of bringing life back where everything had become frozen. This doesn’t happen with a magic wand — or without friction. The path is necessarily incremental — and sometimes uncomfortable. Because structuring differently also brings to the surface what had remained hidden: blind spots, tensions, and inherited patterns we’d rather ignore.
But making structure “alive” is not a luxury—it’s what allows an organization to stay in motion, adapt without losing itself, grow without becoming rigid, and ultimately survive.
In conclusion
It’s not governance that slows organizations down. It’s its absence — or its ambiguity.
It’s not structure that prevents agility. It’s the illusion that we could do without it.
A well-designed architecture doesn’t freeze what’s alive. It supports it. It makes initiative, cooperation, and shared responsibility possible. It protects collective intentions from ego games and inherited reflexes. It allows everyone to contribute without getting lost in ambiguity.
It also provides a framework to transform what needs to be transformed. Because without structure, even the most fertile tensions have nowhere to be expressed or adjusted.
And above all, it creates fertile ground for evolution: a clear, adaptable, inhabited framework.
So if you’re going in circles, running into ambiguity, or carrying everything on a few shoulders… it may be time to ask a simple question:
What if the real tipping point were the way you think about — and inhabit — structure?
I founded Paradigm21 in 2018 to share 3 years of experience in creating and managing a "distributed" organization. I am committed to supporting the transformation of our society and its institutions.
Specialized in the diagnosis and supporting transformation, I combine Spiral Dynamics, Integral Vision with a human and holarchic approach to organizations.
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