When culture eats governance for breakfast

Normi Cadavieco considers why governance often looks strong on paper but struggles in practice

We’ve all heard the adage that culture eats strategy for breakfast, but what about culture eating governance for breakfast?

To be clear, this isn’t an argument against governance. I’ve spent nearly 20 years as a governance professional, so I’m not about to undermine its importance. What I mean is something slightly different: on its own, governance doesn’t really do anything.

Because the point of that original adage isn’t that strategy isn’t important. Rather, it’s that without a culture that supports it, strategy goes nowhere. The same is true of governance.

Governance doesn’t fail on paper

Governance is often understood as compliance, process, and regulation – all essential and important. But I like to describe it more simply as doing things the right way.

The trouble is you can’t consistently do things the right way without a culture that supports that. No matter how many policies, controls or risk registers you have in place.

Because governance doesn’t fail on paper; it fails in practice, and the gap between those two things is almost always behavioural.

When structure isn’t the problem

One of the reasons this pattern shows up so consistently is that when organisations invest in governance, that investment is often focused on structure: new systems, new templates, new frameworks, new processes. All of these are important, but far less attention is given to the behaviours that make those things work in practice – how people understand them, how they use them and how consistently they are applied.

What you end up with is governance that looks stronger on paper but doesn’t always translate into better conversations or better decisions.

I’ve seen this play out countless times, in different organisations and sectors. And if some of this feels familiar, it’s probably because it is – not because these are specific examples, but because the same pattern repeats itself.

An organisation invests in a new risk management system. There’s a lot of energy behind it – procurement, implementation, and training sessions. It’s positioned as the thing that will ‘fix’ risk. But a few months in, people are still unsure what good risk management actually looks like. Risks are logged inconsistently; some are too detailed, some too vague, and conversations about risk haven’t really shifted. The system exists, but it’s sitting slightly to one side of how people actually think and work. In some cases, it’s added another layer of work rather than making things clearer – which is often the opposite of how risk is intended to be understood and used.

Or a new set of reporting templates is introduced to improve the quality of papers going to board. The structure is tighter, the formatting is better and everything looks more consistent. But when you sit in the meeting, the same questions are still being asked. What’s actually changed here? What are we being asked to do? Where are the risks in this? The template is being followed, but it hasn’t changed how people write or how others interpret what they’re reading.

I’ve also seen organisations produce detailed governance handbooks – carefully compiled and full of genuinely useful material. They’re signed off, shared, and sometimes even accompanied by an official launch. And then quietly, over time, they disappear from view. People aren’t quite sure where they are or when they should use them. New starters aren’t pointed to them. They exist, but they’re not part of how the organisation actually operates day to day.

And terms of reference are a classic: thoughtfully written, aligned to best practice and covering all the right ground. But when you observe the committee itself, they’re rarely referred to. They don’t shape the agenda, or the discussion, or the decisions being made. They exist as a description of how things should work, rather than something that actively guides how they do work.

In all these situations, the structure is there, but the behaviour that brings it to life isn’t.

Governance is a behavioural system

Early in my career, I described governance as the golden thread that ties everything together. In any organisation, governance underpins how things actually work.

The question is not whether governance exists – it always does, good or bad – but whether people are actively using it. That part comes down to behaviour.

In practice, this shows up in small, everyday ways:

• whether people feel comfortable raising risks early, rather than waiting until they become issues
• whether papers are written to inform decisions, rather than just report information
• whether committees actively test and challenge, or passively receive
• whether governance is seen as something separate from ‘the real work’, or part of how work gets done.

And, importantly, whether there is a shared understanding of what good looks like. Because without that, governance becomes something people comply with rather than a system that supports them to do things in a better, more effective and more efficient way. 

A simple sense-check

If you’re trying to understand whether governance is really working in practice, a few simple questions can help:

• Do people understand why governance processes exist, or just what they have to do?
• Are governance processes used consistently or interpreted differently across teams?
• Do people feel confident using governance to raise, challenge and escalate, or do they avoid it where possible?
• Most tellingly, what do people actually mean when they talk about governance? 

If the answers to these are unclear or inconsistent, the issue is unlikely to be structure. It is much more likely to be behaviour.

Where to start

When governance feels heavy, unclear or underused, the instinct is often to redesign the system – new templates, new structures and new processes.

Sometimes that is necessary, but often the more impactful starting point is simpler: looking at how governance is understood and used in practice.

Because when the behaviours around governance shift, the structures that are already there start to work much harder.

The bottom line is, governance doesn’t come to life through frameworks. It comes to life through people.