Every governance failure gets the same response: add a committee. Nobody ever asks which of the five committees already in the room should be deleted.
I have watched this play out on the same programme, twice, thirteen months apart. An incident happens. A review is commissioned. The review recommends a new gate, a new sign-off, a new board with a name that sounds important. Nobody asks whether the five existing boards had already covered this ground and simply were not being used properly. The new layer gets built. The old layers stay exactly where they were, because retiring a control is a much harder conversation than adding one, and nobody wants to be the person who removed the safeguard right before something went wrong.
Multiply that pattern across a few years of incidents, mergers, audits and regulatory nudges, and you get an organisation with more governance than anyone can actually operate.
The sprawl nobody planned and everybody built
Governance frameworks get bloated one reasonable-sounding addition at a time, not in a single decision. A near-miss produces a new checkpoint. An audit finding produces a new form. A departing executive leaves behind a committee that made sense under their sponsorship and none under anyone else’s. Each addition was defensible in isolation. Nobody ever sat down and asked what the whole structure looked like once you added them all together.
The organisations most proud of their governance maturity are often the ones carrying the heaviest version of this problem. More boards. More gates. More documented sign-offs. It reads as rigour on an org chart and feels like wading through treacle to anyone actually trying to get something delivered.
Fatigue looks like silence, not rebellion
The expensive part is what people do once the meetings stop making sense to them, not the extra meetings. They do not object. They do not escalate the absurdity of an ninth sign-off. They quietly learn which boxes can be ticked without real scrutiny, which approvals are theatre, and which route gets something through fastest regardless of whether it is the correct one.
That is governance fatigue, and it is far more dangerous than having too little governance in the first place. An organisation with no controls at least knows it is exposed. An organisation with too many controls believes it is protected, right up until the one decision that actually mattered slipped through a gate everyone had stopped taking seriously.
Clarity beats volume, every time
The research on decision rights backs this up more directly than most governance debates acknowledge. Itonics’s analysis of partner and programme governance found that organisations using a properly maintained RACI framework report 70 per cent fewer “who decides” disputes and 25 per cent faster decision cycle times. RACI works by replacing ambiguity with a single, shared answer to a question that used to require a meeting to resolve, not by adding another layer. The gain comes from governance that is unambiguous enough that people stop needing to ask, rather than from adding more of it.
That is the distinction most organisations miss when they respond to a failure by adding structure. The problem was usually oversight so diffuse that nobody could say, without checking three separate documents, who actually held the decision.
The discipline of taking something away
Fixing this requires a habit most organisations have never built: retiring governance on purpose. Every new control should come with an audit of what it is replacing, not just what it is adding. Every steering board should have to justify its existence against a simple test: if this group disappeared tomorrow, what decision would genuinely not get made anywhere else? If the answer is “nothing, it would just move up a level,” that board is inertia with a calendar invite, not governance.
The organisations that manage this well treat their governance structure the way a good engineer treats a system under load, asking what is carrying weight it no longer needs to carry and taking it out, rather than just adding capacity when something breaks.
Governance was never supposed to be heavy. It was supposed to be clear. Somewhere along the way, most organisations mistook the two for the same thing.