Governance has a branding problem.
For many people, the word conjures up policies, approvals, committees, compliance checks and someone somewhere telling you why you can’t do something.
But what if we have misunderstood what governance is supposed to do?
At a recent panel on “Governance vs. Velocity”, Fernando Mourão, Head of Responsible AI at SEEK, challenged the assumption that governance and speed naturally work against each other.
His argument was simple: whether governance slows you down or speeds you up depends largely on when and how you introduce it. If governance appears at the end of a project as a compliance gate, it creates friction. If it is embedded from the beginning, it can become an enabler and accelerator.
That distinction matters far beyond AI. It goes to the heart of how organizations should think about governance itself.
Governance is the behavior of checking
At its simplest, governance is a behavior of checking.
Are our activities and outcomes aligned with:
- what we are trying to achieve?
- the standards we have agreed to?
- the obligations we must meet?
- the values we say matter?
- the risks we are prepared to accept?
That doesn’t sound like bureaucracy. It sounds like good management.
Consider something as fundamental as profitability. If one of your organizational objectives is to generate an appropriate level of profit, wouldn’t you want to check whether you are actually making money?
You would measure revenue, margins, costs and cash flow. You would compare actual performance against targets. If the results were not where they should be, you would investigate why and make improvements.
That is governance.
The same principle applies to quality, safety, information security, customer experience, employee performance, AI, environmental objectives and almost every other part of organizational life.
Governance is the feedback loop between what we said we wanted to achieve and what is actually happening.
The problem isn’t governance. It is how governance is implemented.
Fernando made an important distinction during the discussion.
When governance is introduced at the last moment as a compliance checkpoint, teams understandably experience it as friction. Product teams want to deliver value, but suddenly find another stakeholder standing between them and release.
His experience was that a better approach was to build relationships with product managers and position governance as a partner in delivery — helping teams ask important questions earlier, rather than stopping them later. This changes the conversation.
Instead of:
“Can I get approval to do this?”
governance becomes:
“What needs to be true for us to do this successfully?”
That is a very different mindset.
Fernando used the analogy of a chef skipping mise en place — the preparation of ingredients and equipment before cooking begins. Skipping the preparation might feel faster for the first few minutes, but you are not really saving time. You are simply starting the chaos sooner.
Good governance provides that preparation.
It creates enough clarity around objectives, boundaries, responsibilities and checks that people can move faster with confidence.
Governance should make success repeatable
Perhaps one of Fernando’s most important observations was that governance does more than help organizations achieve an outcome safely.
It helps make that achievement “replicable, persistent, reliable.” This is where governance becomes a genuine growth capability.
A business might successfully deliver something once through individual effort, heroics or good luck.
But growth requires the organization to do it again.
And again.
At greater scale.
With different people.
For more customers.
Potentially with AI agents and automated systems participating in the work.
That requires repeatability.
Governance provides the mechanisms through which organizations can understand what worked, check whether it continues to work and improve it when conditions change. Without that capability, growth often creates more chaos rather than more value.
Governance doesn’t live in a policy
One of the most significant points from the panel was that governance cannot simply exist in documents.
The discussion challenged the idea that having policies and frameworks means an organization has governance. Those documents may provide the starting point, but governance ultimately lives in day-to-day actions, controls, decisions and behaviors.
This is particularly important as organizations adopt AI.
Fernando argued that organizations should stop treating AI governance purely as a compliance discipline. It extends beyond compliance and risk into the behaviors people demonstrate every day. He also argued that AI agents are forcing organizations to decentralize governance: it cannot belong to one central governance team; it increasingly needs to be embedded at the operational level.
The same is true of operational governance generally.
Quality isn’t owned by the Quality Manager.
Information security isn’t owned solely by IT.
AI governance isn’t owned solely by a Responsible AI committee.
Customer experience isn’t owned solely by Customer Success.
Governance becomes effective when the people performing the work understand the objective, understand the boundaries and participate in checking and improving the way work gets done.
Why employees sometimes experience governance as a barrier
If governance is designed to enable better outcomes, why does it so often feel restrictive?
There are several possibilities.
Sometimes people simply don’t understand the why behind the governance decision. They see an approval, control or required process without understanding the objective or risk it is intended to address.
Sometimes there is a genuine values mismatch. Leadership may consider a particular outcome important while employees do not attach the same importance to it.
And sometimes organizations have inadvertently taught employees that governance is something that is done to them.
Follow the procedure.
Complete the training.
Get the approval.
Tick the box.
Don’t ask questions.
That is not a healthy governance culture. People should understand that they have a voice.
If a process is unnecessarily difficult, say so.
If a control no longer serves its purpose, question it.
If technology could remove an unnecessary step, propose it.
If an objective no longer makes sense, challenge it.
Governance should provide a mechanism for stakeholders to continually ask:
Is the way we are working still the best way to achieve the outcome we need?
Governance enables safe experimentation
This becomes particularly important in emerging areas such as AI, where organizations cannot possibly know all the answers before they begin.
Fernando’s recommendation was to put yourself safely but regularly into uncomfortable positions, test, learn from failures and adapt quickly. Organizations need a foundation that allows them to experiment without assuming they can make every decision correctly from the beginning.
That is governance as an enabler of innovation.
Not:
“We cannot move until we eliminate every risk.”
But:
“How can we move, observe what happens, learn and improve within an acceptable level of risk?”
Fernando extended this thinking to AI agents. Before organizations rush to deploy agents into production, he suggested they first consider their ability to test, observe, log and monitor those agents. Without those capabilities, organizations cannot learn at the pace required.
The check does not prevent innovation. The check enables learning. And learning enables faster improvement.
From “governance versus growth” to “governance for growth”
Perhaps it is time to stop talking about governance as the opposite of speed. Poor governance can absolutely slow an organization down. Over-engineered frameworks, endless approval chains and controls without a clear purpose can become barriers to progress.
But that is not an argument against governance.
It is an argument for better governance.
Governance should help organizations clearly define what they are trying to achieve, understand the boundaries within which they can act, perform the work, check the outcomes, learn from what happened and continuously improve. That creates something incredibly valuable: confidence to move.
For a growing organization, the question therefore shouldn’t be:
“How much governance can we tolerate before it starts slowing us down?”
It should be:
“What governance do we need so that we can move faster without losing control of the outcomes that matter?”
Because checking that you are achieving your objectives isn’t bureaucracy. It is how you know whether your strategy is working. It is how you improve. It is how you make success repeatable. And ultimately, it is how governance becomes a growth enabler.
