If decisions shape risk, accountability has to start before harm occurs.
Most people do not think about governance until something has already gone wrong. This post is about what governance (not government) actually does before that point. Not as paperwork or bureaucracy, or as something that can be figured out later.
Instead, we’re looking at it as a structure that decides who gets heard early enough to matter, who could get left carrying the burden, and who gets risk management.
The funny thing about what makes governance hard to interpret is that it never announces itself. Since governance isn’t a person (though we’re the ones who establish it), it usually shows up disguised as something else. For example, it can look like an approval chain, a delayed reply, a tool, or a missing voice in the room. Or, if you’ve even been subject to decisions made by your local municipality without public input, approval, or notice (like conditional use approval or increased public notice requirements, say, if an energy company wanted to drill new gas wells or implement a coal strip mining operation in your neighborhood).
In any situation, being left out of those types of decisions somehow feels final before the people most affected even know it is being made. That is part of why so many people treat governance like a formality, even though it is actually shaping the work the entire time.
It is also a major part of what keeps our democracy in place. We’ve just been trained to “let the professionals/experts figure it out.”
Who gets a say?
That question matters before things go wrong. However, as real humans, we can probably all remember times when we or someone we know allowed others to make decisions for us. We trusted them to act in our best interest without even seeking our input. Then, when the decision was made, we heard about it, and it turned out to be the wrong decision, or the story changed in a different direction, and we realized it was too late.
In business, once a rollout fails, trust slips, or access gets restricted, the window for real input is already closed. By then, people are usually reacting to consequences they never helped shape.
The caveat here is that, in those instances, we treat our lives as if our input and voices don’t matter. Like it is our boss making life decisions for us OUTSIDE of work. When you’re not the boss (or your boss’s boss), where does it leave you?
What I always try to know is who is in the room while decisions are still forming, while there is still time to question the structure, challenge the assumptions behind it, and change course.
That is why governance matters more than many people admit, realize, or even think about. Governance is not just paperwork, approvals, or a chain of command sitting off to the side. It shapes what gets approved, delayed, ignored, enforced, and normalized. Normalized is the keyword there. More importantly, it helps determine who bears the risk when those decisions affect real people. That question is also at the center of who absorbs the risk when systems fail.
Governance is often treated like a formality.
For some people, that may sound abstract. If it does, stick with me.
Governance can sound like policies, approvals, documentation, oversight, or a chain of command that sits off to the side while the “real work” happens somewhere else and by someone else. But that framing misses the point.
Governance is not separate from the work.
It shapes the work.
It influences who has input, whose concerns are taken seriously, which risks get dismissed, what standards are applied, and what trade-offs are considered acceptable and again, normalized. In other words, governance helps determine what an organization (organizations are not just businesses, by the way) is willing to protect and who it is willing to inconvenience.
That is not a minor detail. That is structural. It is also part of the underlying infrastructure people rely on, whether they realize it or not.
And when governance is weak, vague, performative, and/or concentrated in too few hands, those effects spread outward.
Then, as they spread, they can start appearing elsewhere. They show up in systems. They show up in teams. Sometimes they show up in implementation. Other times, they manifest in the lives of the people who have to live with those decisions.
So who gets included early enough to matter?
This is the part I believe is frequently missed, if not missed all of the time.
Because many organizations say they “value feedback” and/or “transparency,” but those two things are not the same as meaningful governance. Meaningful governance is not just asking for input after direction has already been made, nor is it asking us to react to a “nearly finished” decision. A lot of that also depends on what gets tracked once a decision starts hardening into process. Plus, it doesn’t use participation to create the appearance of care without sharing any real influence.
In other words, if the people most affected by a decision are brought in too late, then their inclusion is limited from the start. The same goes for decisions around accessibility, privacy, and security.
Anyway, if accessibility is reviewed after the design is functionally done, that is not strong governance. It is a failure. I wrote more about that in my earlier post on accessibility and why it has to be built in from the start. The same goes for privacy concerns. If privacy concerns are raised only after a tool has already been selected, that is also not strong governance. That is also why the distinction between privacy and protection matters.
Another scenario is if frontline workers are expected to carry the friction created by leadership decisions they had no role in shaping, and complaints go unrecognized and unresolved, that is not strong governance either. It’s poor management.
Does accountability begin before the implementation of governance?
I would like to say yes, but depending on the scenario, it is open to interpretation because governance can be difficult to pinpoint. However, accountability begins before governance is treated like an inconvenience, when urgency and inflexible deadlines are used to bypass reflection and protocols.
Be aware that moving quickly is not the same as governing well. Of course, in some cases, speed could be necessary (think about new healthcare protocols and programs implemented during COVID-19). However, speed without structure often means the people with the least power get the least protection. At least that is what history shows (shoutout to the social workers out there).
It also shifts our attention as consumers.
We report “customer service issues” > The complaint is sent to a queue for response > Once reviewed, it gets “remediated” from our external perspective.
Yet does anything really get resolved by your complaint? Does anything change in the company, or does governance make things more challenging? I recently discovered this research paper, “Governance Challenges and Decision-Making Models in the Public Sector.” The study identifies that political, financial, and digital pressures increase decision complexity by 40–60%, necessitating shifts toward independent commissions and agile, participatory models.
Because…
Governance is also about what gets normalized.
That includes the above scenarios, and it is more than just “policy” language. What gets normalized includes habits, defaults, and what people stop questioning because “that is just how things work.”
And guess what?
Once those patterns become the norm, it becomes easier for institutions to defend them and harder for people to challenge them.
That is not just a governance problem. It is a culture problem, too. And when work or company culture reinforces weak governance, people may stop expecting better altogether.
Good governance is not about slowing everything down.
It is about making sure the right questions get asked early enough to matter. We can start with these questions:
- Who is positively affected?
- Who is negatively affected?
- Who else is missing from the conversation?
- Are there assumptions shaping our process?
- How do we pinpoint those assumptions?
- Who has to explain it, fix it, or live with it?
- Who doesn’t?
Those are governance questions that are also ethical. And in practice, they are operational questions, too. It is also why governance need not be the sole domain of executives, boards, or compliance teams.
It belongs to folks who don’t hold those titles, too, if not more so, because it impacts project planning, communications, system design, accessibility reviews, privacy decisions, and so on. That is also part of how people can contribute from the roles they already have.
It also belongs in the places where people decide what gets built, how it gets used, and what kinds of tradeoffs are considered acceptable.
It’s about shaping outcomes.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Good governance sometimes shows up clearly, or it appears through what is missing, like a process, standard, and feedback loop. Usually, what’s really missing, though, is the person in the room who gets disenfranchised from what seems like a common-sense decision.
If it seems like a no-brainer, it usually isn’t.
Typically, that “right person” missing from the room doesn’t ever know they had a say, because what has been built systemically and accepted as our new normal is important. The other missing thing is an explanation for why a decision was made the way it was in the first place.
And when we willingly let those gaps remain unresolved, organizations tend to pass the burden (over time, not intentionally and unknowingly) to the people closest to the problem. That is, until we call it out.
And at the end of the day
It is not coincidental that organizations/corporations treat governance as something secondary and “bureaucratic.”
It’s systemic.
And the powers that be do not want us to know that (their) decisions shape (y/our) risk. That is perhaps one reason why decision-making gets poorly or unintentionally tracked. This means accountability has to start before more harm occurs.
That also means governance and accountability has to start before rollout and definitely before implementation. When it does not, we all witness public-facing injustice, time and time again.
So when I ask who gets a say, I am not asking for performative inclusion. I am asking whether governance is strong enough to make accountability real while there is still time to protect people.
Because once a decision becomes structured, someone has to live inside it.
And that is exactly why governance cannot be an afterthought.