Practice : Governance Health Checks
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Governance Health Checks are periodic, structured reviews of how well the organisation's governance structures, processes, and decision-making forums are functioning — not just whether decisions are being made, but whether they are being made well, at the right level, with appropriate information, and with genuine accountability for outcomes.
Governance accumulates debt just as code does. Processes that were sensible for a smaller organisation become bottlenecks as it scales. Forums that served a clear purpose outlive their usefulness. Decision-making rights that made sense under one structure become confusing after a reorganisation. Governance health checks create the discipline of regularly examining and improving how the organisation governs itself.
Description of the Practice
- Governance health checks are conducted annually or after significant organisational changes.
- They assess: decision quality, meeting effectiveness, accountability clarity, information flow, and process overhead.
- The review is facilitated by someone without a stake in the current governance structure to enable honest assessment.
- Findings are prioritised and actioned, not just catalogued.
- Changes to governance structures are implemented iteratively and reviewed for effectiveness.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Conduct a simple governance audit: list all standing governance forums, their purpose, attendance, and the decisions they produce.
- Ask: "Which forums produce decisions? Which produce discussion? Which produce reporting?"
- Survey participants: "Is this forum a good use of your time? What would make it more effective?"
- Identify the top 3 governance improvements and address them before the next review cycle.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Use a structured health check framework: assess decision quality, decision rights clarity, information flow, meeting effectiveness, and accountability culture.
- Benchmark governance health against previous reviews — are things improving or worsening?
- Integrate governance health into leadership performance conversations: leaders are partly assessed on the quality of governance in their domain.
- Connect governance improvements to measurable outcomes: faster decisions, lower meeting load, reduced escalation frequency.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Leaders treat governance health as a leadership responsibility, not an HR or operations task.
- Participants in governance forums give honest assessments of their effectiveness.
- Governance improvements are implemented and their effect is measured — not just proposed.
- The organisation develops a culture of challenging its own governance rather than protecting it.
4. Watch Out For…
- Governance health checks that produce recommendations but no change.
- Reviews that only assess whether processes are followed, not whether they are useful.
- Leaders who protect existing governance structures because they provide control, not because they provide value.
- Making governance changes without assessing their downstream impact on teams who depend on them.
5. Signals of Success
- Governance overhead decreases over time as unnecessary processes are removed or simplified.
- Decision quality improves, evidenced by fewer reversals and better outcome achievement.
- Leaders report spending less time in governance activities that do not produce value.
- The organisation is able to make significant governance changes without disruption — because health checks have kept the structure current.
- Governance health is talked about as a leadership concern, not an administrative one.