Perspective #02 · Transformation
The Steering Committee nobody wanted, and why it kept the programme alive
Governance is not bureaucracy. It's where the disagreement finally has somewhere to go.
A programme with strong delivery and no owned decision will drift regardless of how good the plan is.
The programme I remember most clearly wasn't struggling with delivery. The technical team was excellent, the plan was sound, the milestones were realistic. What it lacked was somewhere for disagreement among the sponsors to land.
Three business unit leaders each had a legitimate, slightly different view of what the transformation was for. None of them was wrong. But without a forum where that difference had to be resolved rather than merely discussed, each of them quietly steered the parts of the programme they touched toward their own version — and the programme absorbed three strategies instead of delivering one.
Introducing a sponsor board with an explicit decision right — not a steering committee that reviews slides, a body that actually owns trade-offs and is accountable for them — felt, at first, like adding a layer of bureaucracy to a programme that was already struggling to move fast. It was the opposite. Once disagreement had a place to be resolved, it stopped leaking sideways into scope changes, and the programme could finally hold a line.
Good governance doesn't slow a transformation down. The absence of it does — quietly, for a long time, until someone finally asks why nothing seems to be finished.