Governance: a moral exercise

The 2025 Reith Lectures from Rutger Bregman focused on the moral challenges that hallmark this current time of political instability. Our CEO Professor Andrew Corbett-Nolan believes that governance is an essentially moral activity of high consequence.

Governance is not a morally neutral activity. It is an intellectually rigorous and ethically demanding endeavour that shapes the behaviour of organisations and, by extension, their impact on society. Governance has at its core the obligation to do good, a timely discussion to have in today’s troubled world.

This Christmas I have very much enjoyed listening to the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s 2025 Reith Lectures. Bregman argues, very convincingly to me, that our era is not defined by a battle between left and right but by a deeper struggle between good and evil. He states “The most urgent transformation of our time is not technological or geopolitical or industrial, but moral. We need a new kind of ambition, not for status, or wealth, or fame, but for integrity, courage, and public service, a moral ambition.”

This framing challenges us to practise governance not as a bureaucratic exercise but as a moral act, particularly in public-purpose organisations tasked with serving the public good. Drawing on the principles of the King Committee Reports, the work at GGi and the sobering lessons of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (which I have obsessively followed), this article argues that governance carries a profound moral duty. Boards, as the ‘controlling conscience’ of organisations, must engage in relentless self-challenge to prevent moral failure. Governance at its heart is about making difficult choices through a moral lens, grounded in evidence, honesty and diligence.

Governance as a moral act

The King Committee Reports, from King I (1994) to King V (2025), have consistently framed governance as the exercise of ethical and effective leadership. King IV defines it as achieving ‘an ethical culture, value creation, effective control and legitimacy’, emphasising that governance is not just about structures and processes but about moral responsibility. At GGi, we echo this view, advocating that governance in public-purpose organisations - such as NHS trusts, local authorities and state-owned entities like the Post Office - requires boards to navigate ethical dilemmas, balance competing priorities and align decisions with organisational purpose. Our published work – perhaps the largest single corpus of governance thinking for UK public-purpose organisations - stresses that every board decision, from resource allocation to risk management, carries moral weight because it affects lives, communities and public trust.

Bregman’s Reith Lectures provide a compelling lens for this argument. By characterising our time as a battle between good and evil he challenges leaders to prioritise purpose over profit and to reject cynicism. His remarks, though, are not confined to leaders only but to us all. He critiques ‘socially worthless’ jobs, including I am afraid some compliance roles. This prompts reflection on the social value of governance. While Bregman questions the value of compliance, I contend that both governance and compliance roles are socially valuable, indeed invaluable, when undertaken with moral clarity. The Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017, where 72 lives were lost due to systemic failures in regulatory oversight, underscores the catastrophic consequences of weak compliance. Similarly, governance roles are vital because they set the tone for organisational behaviour, particularly in public purpose entities entrusted with different elements of societal welfare.

The social value of governance and compliance

Bregman’s scepticism about compliance roles invites scrutiny, but the evidence suggests they are far from worthless. Compliance ensures adherence to standards that protect people, whether through health and safety regulations, financial accountability, or data protection. The Grenfell inquiry revealed how lapses in diligence and accountability allowed unsafe practices to persist, highlighting the moral duty of compliance professionals to act as guardians of public safety.

Governance roles, meanwhile, are the linchpin of organisational integrity. Boards of public-purpose organisations, such as universities or significant charities, are stewards of institutions that heal, educate or serve communities. Their decisions shape not only operational outcomes but also societal trust. In King’s words they are in the business of value creation.

The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry catalogues one of the UK’s most significant governance failures and illustrates my point vividly. As we all know between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud or false accounting due to errors in the Horizon IT system. The inquiry, ongoing as of 2025, has exposed a litany of governance shortcomings, from groupthink to denial and cover-up, resulting in bankruptcies, imprisonments and at least 13 suicides. In a 2024 blog post, I wrote of my incredulity at the Post Office’s failures, noting a ‘phase of incompetence followed by a period of groupthink’ that led to ‘absurd denial, quickly leaching into lying and then cover-up.’ This scandal underscores the social value of governance done well and the devastation when it fails.

Governance beyond compliance

At GGi, we have long argued that governance transcends compliance. While compliance ensures legal and regulatory adherence, governance is an intellectually challenging activity that involves navigating complexity, balancing stakeholder interests and making decisions in uncertainty. King III’s ‘apply and explain’ principle and King V’s emphasis on ‘integrated thinking’ encourage boards to consider social, environmental, and ethical factors alongside financial performance. GGI’s Guide to Ethical Governance urges boards to ask not only ‘Can we do this?’ but ‘Should we do this?’ — a question that demands moral and intellectual rigour.

Bregman’s call to prioritise purpose aligns with this view. Governance roles are socially valuable because they involve wrestling with ethical dilemmas and striving for just outcomes. For example, a local authority deciding how to cut budgets during austerity must weigh financial constraints against the human cost to vulnerable residents. Such decisions require evidence-based reasoning, honest dialogue and a moral lens that prioritises human dignity. As the ‘controlling conscience’ of the organisation, the board must ensure that its actions reflect its values and purpose.

The moral duty of diligence and self-challenge

A cornerstone of governance’s moral dimension is the duty of diligence, which requires directors to scrutinise evidence, ask tough questions and challenge assumptions. This duty extends beyond compliance to assurance. GGi’s Assurance Framework guides boards to assess risks and performance with integrity, acting as stewards of public trust. King IV’s principle of ‘effective control’ and King V’s concept of ‘ethical assurance’ reinforce this, emphasising that diligence is a moral act of safeguarding stakeholders.

Diligence alone is insufficient without self-challenge. Boards should rigorously question their own assumptions, biases and decisions to prevent moral failure. The Post Office Inquiry, through the testimony of governance expert witness Professor Dame Sandra Dawson and Dr. Katy Steward, highlights the catastrophic consequences of failing to self-challenge. Alongside, they produced two reports for the inquiry, analysing governance and culture at Post Office Ltd. Their 133-page Report 1 covers principles like accountability, monitoring and whistleblowing while Report 2 examines board-level governance and organisational culture through case studies. Steward’s testimony on 12-13 November 2024 emphasised that the Post Office board lacked curiosity and failed to probe the Horizon system’s flaws, despite mounting evidence. She noted a culture of ‘ill-thought acceptance’ and a ‘distorting rejection of reality’, where directors did not challenge executives or question the narrative that sub-postmasters were at fault.

This failure to self-challenge led to a governance disaster. Post Office directors, many of whom were high-profile and presumably well-intentioned, allowed a toxic culture to persist. They prioritised brand protection over the obvious truth. As I wrote in 2024, the board’s ‘gob-smacking disinterest’ and ‘preoccupation bias’ of shielding the Post Office’s reputation enabled a 17-year saga of eye-watering injustice. The inquiry revealed that even when doubts about Horizon surfaced, directors doubled down, spending £298 million on legal fees to outspend claimants and rewarding executives with bonuses for complying with the Inquiry. This reflects a profound moral failure, where directors who no doubt saw themselves as moral actors caused enormous harm to individuals and the organisation.

Lessons from Nuremberg: no excuse for moral failure

Like Bregman I am interested in history and find its study a revealing to make sense of the problems of today. This year I also enjoyed watching the excellent and thought-provoking film Nuremberg, which inspired an article I published in December. The Post Office scandal echoes themes from this article, which explores how the Nuremberg trials exposed the human capacity to engage in profoundly bad acts under the guise of duty or loyalty. The defendants – chillingly ordinary people and not abnormal monsters - justified their actions by claiming they were following orders or that they lacked the power to resist. Yet Nuremberg established that there is no excuse for moral failure. Individuals and leaders must take responsibility for their actions, regardless of context.

This lesson applies to governance. Directors, like the Post Office board, may believe they are ‘doing the right thing’ and acting in the organisation’s best interests, but good intentions need testing. Without self-challenge, leaders should appreciate that they risk being drawn into groupthink, then denial and finally cover-up, as seen in the Post Office’s refusal to acknowledge Horizon’s flaws despite thousands of complaints.

My Nuremberg article argues that governance requires a moral compass to resist the pull of organisational loyalty or self-preservation. Directors must confront uncomfortable truths, even at personal or professional cost, to prevent harm. It goes with the job. The Post Office board’s failure to do so led to a miscarriage of justice that ruined lives, eroded public trust and crashed their company.

In my experience governance failures in public purpose organisations – and I have seen more than a few over the last three decades - often stem from a lack of self-challenge. Boards must foster cultures of inquiry, encouraging dissent and what I call constructive scepticism to avoid groupthink and ensure sound, ethical decision-making.

The board as the ‘controlling conscience’

The metaphor of the board as the “controlling conscience” captures its role as the moral and intellectual steward of the organisation. King V’s focus on stakeholder inclusivity and GGi’s Stakeholder Engagement Toolkit emphasise that boards must engage diverse voices to ensure decisions reflect societal needs.

In public-purpose organisations, where the stakes are high, this rigorous application of the board’s collective conscience is critical. An NHS trust seen to prioritise cost improvements over patient safety, a charity that deploys an insufficent proportion of funds on their charitable purpose, or most infamously a Post Office that persecutes innocent workers betrays its purpose and erodes trust.

Self-challenge is the mechanism through which the board fulfils this role. This ‘judgement muscle’, as Fidelio Partners call it, needs deliberately growing through board development and requires proper board time to exercise. Directors need to question their own biases, interrogate well-constructed executive reports and seek external perspectives to avoid complacency. The Post Office Inquiry shows what happens when this fails: a board that does not challenge a faulty narrative becomes complicit in harm. Professor Dawson and Dr. Steward’s testimony at the inquiry underscores that effective governance requires curiosity and courage, qualities that were absent in the Post Office’s leadership.

Conclusion: governance for a moral future

In an era of complex challenges – productivity failings in public services, climate change, growing inequalities, technological disruption, political instability - governance is both a practical and moral imperative as we work on these major issues. Bregman’s thought-provoking 2025 Reith Lectures remind us that our choices can advance good or perpetuate evil.

Governance and compliance roles are socially valuable because they shape how organisations serve society. The Post Office Inquiry, with its revelations of denial and moral failure, serves as a stark warning of what happens when boards fail to self-challenge. My reflections on Nuremberg reinforce that there is no excuse for such failures; directors must act with moral clarity and accountability.

The King reports and GGi’s work provide a roadmap for ethical governance. By embracing self-challenge, diligence, and a commitment to purpose boards can act as the controlling conscience, steering organisations toward just outcomes. Those of us who have the privilege of being directors of public purpose organisations need to ensure that the institutions we steward bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, one courageous decision at a time.

As Richard Millett KC reminded the Grenfell Inquiry, “every decision … affects someone somewhere, someone who is unknown and unseen, but who is an adored child, a beloved sister.”

This human-centred call for diligence articulates perfectly the need for boards to always and consciously pursue a moral path.

Moral governance in practice

What does this all mean for directors and boards in the ordinary day-to-day? I would say that at a high level this all translates into three questions every board should ask before major decisions:

1. Is this lawful and compliant?
2. Is it ethical by the standards a reasonable outsider would apply?
3. If it later causes harm, will I be able to defend my role with pride?

Further, if we can agree that governance is a moral act, morality cannot be left to high-level intentions in isolation of practical applications. There is a more immediate, granular level of ordinary working practice that boards should embrace. A board’s moral ambition must show itself in practice, for example, in how meetings are chaired, how risks are framed, what behaviours are tolerated and what truths are pursued when it would be easier to look away.

Boards must also be wary of mistaking good intent for good governance. A director may be principled and public-spirited yet still be drawn into collective failure if the board lacks the habits of moral challenge.

So, what does moral governance look like in practice and how can it be developed?

It starts with boards building a culture of inquiry and constructive scepticism and treasuring the ability to ask, without fear or embarrassment:

• what might we be wrong about?
• what is the most uncomfortable explanation that still fits the facts?
• whose voice is missing from this discussion?
• who is likely to be impacted, perhaps harmed, by our decision, even unintentionally?
• if this decision was reported on the front page tomorrow, what would we struggle to defend?
• Are we pursuing our success in a way that is subsidised by negative impacts elsewhere?

There are also practical warning signs of moral drift that boards should recognise early. For example:

• an absence of dissent in board discussions, with apparent ‘alignment’ masking discomfort or fatigue
• not getting the best from non-executives, even to the extent where concerns are repeatedly ‘managed’ without evidence of learning or scrutiny
• the substitution of reputation management for truth-seeking, where the organisation becomes more focused on defending itself than understanding what is happening
• a narrowing of evidence, where the board sees only curated information rather than triangulated data and direct voices from the front line.

If boards want to be morally serious, they must be structurally serious too. Moral ambition needs method, buttressed by independent scrutiny where appropriate, safe and trusted whistleblowing routes and a board that tests positive assurance rather than absorbs it.

What turns out to be moral failure is often a product of ‘protecting the organisation’. That is why directors and boards should practise self-challenge relentlessly.