Ctrl + Alt + Govern

Reflections, questions (mostly hypothetical), and the occasional policy rants on governance.

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  • The multi-agency governance tango: who’s leading?

    Multi-agency governance feels like a tango. It requires coordination, trust, timing and an agreed set of steps. Everyone has to move together, anticipate one another and stay in rhythm. When it works well, it looks effortless. When it doesn’t, it’s awkward and someone ends up with a bruised toe.

    In the public sector, we are good at insisting that organisations dance together. For decades, legislation has required agencies to collaborate on shared outcomes: community safety, safeguarding, reducing reoffending, public protection – the list goes on. The idea behind these mandated collaborations is that no single organisation can address complex societal problems alone.

    But what if you have no power over the steps that your partner will dance? What if they know the rhythm in advance but you don’t? A tension is created at the heart of these arrangements: the partnership working and collaboration is mandated, but the power rarely is.

    On paper, multi-agency boards are excellent at agreement. They agree priorities, action plans, strategies, performance metrics but what they are much less able to do is influence the things that actually determine outcomes: resource allocation, organisational capacity, or how to balance competing organisational priorities within partner agencies. Collaboration is compulsory; impact is not.

    This creates an interesting accountability illusion. Everyone around the table is responsible, but no one is empowered to achieve. Decisions are made, but delivery depends on whether each organisation can (or chooses to) actually take actions forward into individual organisations. When progress stalls, the partnership group review and refresh…and meets again. The dance continues, but nobody is quite sure who’s leading it.

    Since their inception, Police and Crime Commissioners (and their offices) often acted as a spearhead of multi-agency criminal justice partnerships. While there were certainly challenges around having a politically elected official leading criminal justice, they did provide something that partnerships lack: a visible convenor with a strategic remit and at least some levers – be that commissioning, grant funding, scrutiny or convening authority. In practice, many PCCs became the centre around partnership systems orbited.

    This model is now changing. With PCCs being disbanded and their functions being absorbed into mayoral or local authority structures, the question of “who leads” multi-agency governance becomes sharper. There is a genuine opportunity here: broader public service alignment, fewer siloed strategies, and crime being considered alongside housing, health and education rather than in isolation. However, there is a risk that leadership becomes even more diffuse – spread across systems already stretched for capacity and clarity.

    The challenge is not whether partnerships should exist. They should – that was settled long ago. The real challenge is whether we are prepared to challenge the status quo and design governance arrangements that match the complexity of the problems we expect them to solve.

    Effective multi-agency governance needs more than goodwill and regular meetings. It needs clear choreography and dancers who are empowered to know it. This means being explicit about decisions and influence – what the board can decide, what it can only recommend, and where ultimate accountability sits. It means linking governance to resource (potentially through pooled budgets), aligned commissioning cycles and transparent acknowledgement of constraints. It means clarifying the remits of the governance and resisting the temptation to create new boards every time a new duty appears.

    Most importantly – it requires us to be honest about power. Collaboration without influence and power breeds frustration. Governance without levers becomes performance. If everyone is expected to lead a little, the risk is no one leads enough.

    A tango only works when partners understand their roles, trust the structure and move with purpose. Multi-agency governance is no difference. We can keep forcing the dance – or we can finally focus on the choreography.

  • Reflections on AI, Administration and Governance

    Well, it’s been a while! Time got away from me over the festive period BUT it did give me a lot of time for reflection – and I’ve been reflecting on AI.

    In the last post, I talked about the value of solid administrative skills in supporting and enabling governance within organisations, however it would be remiss of me to not raise the impact of AI on executing administrative roles, particularly within the context of governance.

    Let’s be clear: I personally believe that AI will never be able to replace skilled administrative staff, it simply cannot replicate the judgement, contextual awareness and relational work that good administration brings. Also, have you ever seen AI try and transcribe a Welsh accent? I have – it’s not great. That said, it would be naïve to ignore that many organisations are reviewing administrative roles to factor in the efficiencies promised by AI tools.

    We’ve seen this pattern before. In the 1990s, the rise of computers and digital tools prompted similar predictions and restructures, yet administrative work didn’t disappear; it adapted, professionalised and became even more central to how organisations functioned. The problem isn’t that AI will impact administrative jobs – it will, however, as with the digitisation in the 1990s, AI will change the shape of administrative work, not the need for administrative capability. In this way, AI is being deployed into administrative landscapes that are already under-skilled, under-resourced, and over-stretched – which makes skilled administrative professionals more important, not less.

    Within the context of supporting governance, AI definitely has the potential to make meaningful difference. Many organisations are suffering governance fatigue, with too many boards and subgroups, overlapping reporting cycles, and an ever-growing volume of papers that obscure rather than support effective oversight. Combining this governance fatigue with a lack of administrative capacity to appropriately service the boards in the way that is needed. This is where AI can support – by helping streamline processes, condense information, and reduce administrative burden, enabling administrative staff to focus on judgement, coordination and sense-making rather than volume management.

    All of this to say: AI should not be used to bolster or sustain overly dense governance structures. It should be used to support in challenging them, helping organisations to reduce governance fatigue rather than administer it more efficiently. Using AI simply to administer complex governance structures risks entrenching the very problems organisations are trying to solve.

    One of the challenges in complex governance isn’t a lack of information, but fragmentation. AI can be used to consolidate papers across multiple boards and subgroups; surface common themes, risks, or decisions; identify duplication or misalignment between committees; distinguish between items for decision, assurance, escalation or noting…the possibilities are endless.

    BUT

    We need to understand the limitations of AI within this context too. AI misses the nuance of the conversation, tone, hesitation, and power dynamics; its going to miss actions which are agreed within the margins of the meeting; and AI misses the power dynamics within a room and the difference between agreement and acquiescence. We cannot push forward with imbedding AI in practice when we have a workforce who does not fully understand its strengths and limitations as a tool.

    When routine tasks move to AI, people have more bandwidth. Fundamentally AI is a tool, and like any tool, its impact depends on how its used. AI should support and strengthen administrative roles, not be seen as a replacement for them. Without a clear understanding of its limitations, and without investment in the people and skills needed to work alongside it, AI risks becoming another layer of complexity rather than a source of clarity.

  • Administering governance: the lost art of keeping things together

    Governance audits often emphasise the role of leadership within effective governance. Understandably so, leaders provide the highest level of authority, with ultimate responsibility and ensuring strategic direction and oversight. However, I think we are missing an equally important contributor to effective governance – the role of the administrator.

    While I was completing my dissertation, I found that the administration for each of the boards I reviewed was markedly different. Not only in terms of record keeping, but also in terms of minutes, agendas, and action logs which all appeared in different formats and with varying levels of detail. Some of the minutes provided listed no job titles or organisations for attendees, some minutes were written almost verbatim, and some were looser notes. Given that these were from a single organisation, I was surprised at the range of quality in the documents provided.

    Administering governance and meetings is not new to me. Professionally, I have been involved board administration and transcription for a decade, previously within the NHS, then the Police, and now within HMPPS. My mum studied at a polytechnic college to become a secretary and this administrative prowess ebbed down to me, in part due to the typing “games” (formal training exercises) she used to make undertake as a child, so it was no surprise that was where I ended up. Despite administration being a traditional skill and long-standing expertise, finding consistent standards for administering boards is challenging (with the exception of templates for strategic documents such as terms of reference, delivery and action plans, etc – those can be found are in abundance).

    During my dissertation, I tried to understand why there was such variety in the quality of minutes and administrative support provided and discovered that administrative and office support is consistently in the “top ten most difficult skills” to recruit to, and the second most difficult to find in 2024, according to the Manpower Group1. They suggested that the reason for this decline is due to the role reshaping in response to “technological proficiencies”1, however I think it a bit more complicated than that.

    As mentioned, my mum studied secretarial skills in formal structured higher education. At school, as a girl, she was steered towards these classes reflecting the entrenched gender norms that linked women to clerical and secretarial work. With the rise of personal computers, secretarial courses became replaced with business administration courses, where skills being taught changed from organisational and administrative to more technical, such as use of tools such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint. No longer are there any formal routes which provide traditional secretarial skills.

    In addition to a lack of formal routes, administrative roles are often treated as peripheral within organisations, with the invisibility of these roles meaning their impact is rarely measured or understood. The assumption that technology can replace skilled administrators compounds the problem, something which will only grow as we see an increase in the use of tools such as co-pilot meeting transcription. Good administration requires judgement, discretion, contextual understanding and nuance. These are qualities which cannot be automated.  

    When it comes to governance, administration is the glue the holds everything together. It’s fine to have an excellent chair and attendees who show up and contribute, but if administration is poor decisions get lost, actions stall, and accountability erodes. An organisation’s governance is only as strong as the systems that support it, and those systems depend on skilled administrators who bring structure, clarity, and continuity to complex processes, ensuring that everything sticks.

    1 Brook Street (2025) The 2025 talent shortage: Where are the admin and clerical skills? Available at: https://tinyurl.com/42jxfypm

  • Risk management and oversight: the dynamic duo defending the public trust

    In my last blog post I reflected (or ranted?) on why business efficiency and governance are often conflated, referencing several tasks which often sit under governance but are actually business efficiency and management tasks (performance management, budgets and operation). In a moment of self-doubt, I asked myself “where does risk sit?” – if governance is often confused with business efficiency, risk is where the distinction really matters.

    ‘Risk’ in organisational terms can be split into two different functions: risk management and risk oversight.

    Risk management

    Risk management is the operational function that most of us will be familiar with and focuses on what day-to-day actions could be taken to reduce risk impact and likelihood. This is the role of managers, or sometimes dedicated teams, and involves identifying risk, implementing controls, and monitoring compliance via tools such as risk registers.

    In a recent discussion with a senior colleague, we reflected on the common consensus on how risks are identified and managed and how this usually involves a lot of quantitative data with statistical and trends data. It was during this discussion where the colleague expressed concern that organisations are missing the “navel gazey” part of risk management. This is the abstract part of risk management, the thinking in possibilities, it quite easy to imagine a scenario where every dashboard shows green, yet the organisation feels uneasy. In this, we can create complacency in risk management where we become over-reliant on acting upon only what the quantitative data is suggesting but also stuck in old patterns and ways of thinking. In good risk management, qualitative risk thinking is just as important as the quantitative in allowing us to see previously hidden vulnerabilities.

    Risk management needs to find a balance between a mix of qualitative and quantitative, thinking not only “what does the data tell us?” but also “how do things feel?”. The future is unknown, the pandemic taught us that, and having an organisational culture which already values curiosity and adaptive thinking creates resilience when the really unexpected happens.

    Risk oversight

    Risk oversight is the governance-level responsibility of ensuring risk management is effective and aligned with strategic objectives. Risk oversight is usually exercised by boards or groups, rather than the operational teams who manage the risk. Risk oversight asks “are we managing risks in the right way?” – this is where we also get some more of the “navel gazey” work in challenging assumptions in which risks may be managed within the organisation and thinking more “what if?”. Risk oversight should hold a holistic view, going beyond financial and operational risks and thinking about the impact of risk on the reputation and culture of an organisation.

    What should ‘risk’ look like in good governance? A big question, but fundamentally good risk oversight and management should be a core part of organisational culture.  Risk oversight should not be treated as a compliance tick-box, as it often is, and instead should be so integrated that a culture of psychological safety is created so issues and near-misses are surfaced early without fear.  In this way, risks are transparent and ethical where organisations are not scared to hide emerging risks or issues. Effective risk management and oversight signals competence and integrity, both critical elements for sustaining public trust. Using the superhero analogy in the title, risk management is the superhero on the ground fighting the villains – immediate threats and operational challenges. Risk oversight is the strategist in the secret lair making sure the hero has the right tools, the right mission, and safeguarding the hero’s reputation. Ultimately, however, if the public lose the trust in the hero, the mission fails no matter how many villains are defeated.

  • Beyond Efficiency: The Broader Purpose of Governance

    When people think of governance, they often think of business efficiency – discussions around streamlining operations, cost savings, reducing waste. From the outside looking in, that’s what the general public would think but as we know, dear reader, they are wrong. So, the question is, what’s the difference?

    Governance is a framework of rules, relationships and processes within an organisation. Sometimes it’s multi-agency, operating across organisations or sectors, but whether it’s one agency or many, it’s about who has power, who makes decisions, how stakeholders are engaged and heard, and how accountability is ensured – it’s about thinking long-term and sustainability, it’s the “what” and the “why”. Governance is pro-active.  

    Business efficiency is a management related issue; it’s focused on the “how” with operational execution, resource allocation, performance, KPIs, budgets, workflows. It’s generally internal to an organisation or a service, it’s about short to medium-term goals and outputs – sometimes it’s about fire fighting and crisis management – it’s reactive.

    If it’s so easy to separate them on paper (or in writing), why are they blurred in practice? Why are strategic governance boards focused on business efficiency? Too many reasons to list here, probably a books worth (maybe I’ll write one someday…), but in essence I think it comes down to three (main) reasons:

    1. The legacy of New Public Management (NPM)

    When I was doing research for this blog, I came across New Public Management and I realised how little public management more broadly. NPM is best described as an “approach to public sector reform”. It’s not a single methodology or theory, but a collection of principles and practices. The idea was simple: run public services like private enterprises, with a focus on cost-cutting, performance metrics and streamlined operations. This really came to fruition in the 1990s, with influential scholar Christopher Hood, who really coined and conceptualised NPM. This, combined with a time where many governments faced economic crises and pressure to reduce public spending, public sector organisations were pushed – whether encouraged or outright mandated – to increase efficiency by adopting private business-like practices.

    2. Language and semantics

    This was one of my findings while I was doing my master’s dissertation – semantics. Terms like “governance”, “leadership” or “management” are often used interchangeably in policy documents, job descriptions and organisational strategies. This creates ambiguity around function, especially when governance boards are tasked with “driving performance” or “ensuring efficiency”, which are fundamentally managerial business efficiency concerns.

    3. Cultural expectations

    There is a belief, especially amongst the public and media, that good governance means control, costing savings, and quick results. When governance is mentioned in the media, it’s within the context of budget cuts or performance failures – governance is portrayed as the fix, the mechanism for control and cost savings.

    Does efficiency mean success? Not necessarily, and especially not in public sector. When governance is reduced to a conversation about business efficiency, we risk missing its deeper purpose. Governance isn’t just about streamlining operations or cutting costs (although there is some space for these discussions within good governance); it’s about strategic direction, public accountability, and holistic decision making. When organisations don’t separate governance and business efficiency, governance boards start managing, and managers start governing – the liners blur. That’s when governance becomes inefficient, not because it’s slow or costly, but because it’s lost sight of its purpose: to ask are we doing the right things?, not just are we doing the things right?

  • The G-word: why governance still makes eyes glaze over

    When governance is mentioned in a meeting, the energy dips. People are not fundamentally engaged in discussions about terms of reference, decision making protocols or accountability frameworks. Why is this?

    Perception versus reality in governance is stark: those on the front line see governance as dry, procedural, and disconnected from the urgency and complexity of practice. Decision makers versus doers. Governance is misunderstood; it’s seen as a systemic creativity stifler and a red tape enforcer. That said, it’s not just the front line that see it like this. Even those within the governance itself can grow frustrated with slow processes, the burden of compliance, and the dissonance between strategic intent and operational reality.

    I recently read some research on learnings from the South African public sector1, and a couple of terms which piqued my interest were “over-governance” and “governance and reporting fatigue”. When you consider the increase in digital ‘back-to-back’ meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic; the well-known and documented psychological strain which can be felt across various elements of the public sector; and the growing complexity of multi-agency coordination is it any surprise that people are reticent to engage in governance which can feel ineffective and uninspiring? Not really.

    A blog post by Ted Rau2, suggests that governance discussions “seem like a distraction” from the wider aims of an organisation – be that front line operations, service delivery, or crisis response.  This is the point I keep reflecting on, governance just isn’t sexy – it doesn’t have the same emotional resonance that front line services do – but it doesn’t have to be like this. Governance can be fast-paced and focused.

    My take: governance is in a dire need of a rebrand. Governance needs to be reframed. Kimberley Mackenzie3 described this as “cultural recalibration”, the need to move away from “a scripted agenda, nodding heads, and safe-but-empty resolutions that check boxes instead of confronting the real issues”. Governance should be about facilitating a space for collaborative sense-making, where uncomfortable questions are asked and answered, and where agencies take pragmatic problem solving approaches to collaboratively work through issues together, rather than defaulting to rigid compliance, performance reporting or siloed decision-making.

    Throughout the research for this blog post, I’ve been learning about the principles of sociocracy (of which Ted Rau mentioned above is deeply involved, as the co-founder of Sociocracy For All). Sociocracy works on a principle of governance circles, rather than hierarchical governance. Circles work in small groups, with defined aim and authority within their domain. Each circle is linked through a number of designated connectors who facilitate information flow and balance. Decisions within circles are made by consent, and if one member objects the proposal needs to be improved. This creates a system which is semi-autonomous, able to run independently within their scope, yet remain interdependent as part of a cohesive whole.

    Governance has this potential – to become organic and meaningful, a living system that supports participation and innovation, where complexity is embraced, not avoided, and where people feel empowered to shape the systems they work within. I know what you’re thinking “yes, yes, this all sounds lovely in principle, but it would never work in practice”. But why? Why do we hold such complacency when it comes to governance in a world where efficiency and impact are at the forefront of organisational conversations? Because organisations aren’t brave. Organisations aren’t critical and honest enough to break down the systems which have stood the test of time and finally rebrand governance to be a living system which enables their organisation to be responsive, adaptive, and imaginative, rather than rigid, reactive, and repetitive.

    1 Learnings from the South African public sector | Asogan

    2  “Governance is boring?”​ – No, governance helps us be better humans | Ted Rau

    3 From Boring to Bold: Rethinking Governance | Kimberley Mackenzie

  • Post-dissertation reflections – why a blog?

    Originally when I decided I was going to do a Masters in Social Policy, I anticipated my dissertation to be on something sexy (well, sexy in policy terms anyway…). I toyed with ideas like multi-agency operations; geographic variations in policy implementation; or the real world applications of the theoretical policy lifecycle. After a lot of mental ping pong, I ended up settling on the subject I hadn’t expected to find so compelling: governance. Prior to professionally and academically being involved in governance, I thought about corporate meetings as verbose, with the mental image of balding men sat around a table smoking cigars in leather backed chairs – specifically thinking of Winston Churchill in black and white, with his suit and bow tie, seated at a desk surrounded by papers. It wasn’t until I started working in the public sector and being involved in governance that I realised how interesting governance was. Governance is powerful and it’s complicated – but it’s often overlooked in favour of the sexy (again…in a policy context) subjects of front line operations. I finished my dissertation with a whole new appreciation of governance.

    Having spent the last 2 years saying I definitely wanted to do a PhD, when I actually completed my dissertation in August 2025 I realised I needed an academic break. I’d been studying part-time and working full-time for 7 years and I needed to rest from competing deadlines and priorities – I needed a bit of life balance back. I lasted 2 months before the creep started to come back – thinking more about governance and how much I still had left to learn, especially if I want to do a PhD on the subject eventually. So, on one cold dark night, driving Northbound on the M5 I decided I was going to write a blog.

    This blog will serve as a way of keeping my brain tuned in to the subject of governance – not just the theory, but also the messy, fascinating, and often overlooked realities of how decisions are made and organisations are sustained. I plan on publishing short commentaries on different aspects of governance including some more information on my dissertation, the challenges of governing multi-agency partnerships, and the challenge of administering “good governance”.

    Expect reflections, questions (mostly hypothetical), and the occasional policy rant as I infodump on the most mundane special interest ever: governance.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent my employer or any government agency.

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