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Sound governance is to harness people-centricity by increasing process transparency and improving risk-intelligence.

Compared to the industrial era with static information scarce knowledge, inflexible processes, and overly restrictive boundaries in the last century, today’s internet-based world is much more hyper-connected and interdependent, with dynamic aspects such as hyper-diversity, variability, nonlinearity, etc.  Effective governance discipline enhances corporate principles and practices to improve functioning, transparency, and maturity of the company.

Sound governance is to improve management effectiveness and improve risk intelligence: Corporate governance and management are complementary disciplines to keep the business vehicle running in the right direction. The governance structure is independent of the management structure, but the governance process or mechanism can be embedded into the business management process seamlessly, and there are governance practices to enforce accountability at every level of the organization. Sound governance assures the corporations’ operation under the correct directions and behaviors correctly.

To deal with business ineffectiveness pitfalls, strong governance principles harness leadership and enforce management disciplines to ensure the business is doing the right things. To avoid the efficiency trap, solid governance discipline is important to ensure that efficiency is to do what is effective, achieve high business satisfaction with less operating costs and good teamwork, strike the right balance of efficiency and creativity. The goal of organizational governance is to ensure that businesses work as a whole to improve communication, engage employees, lubricate partnership, demonstrate multifaceted business value.

Strong governance improves business alignment and harnesses cross functional collaboration: In most businesses, conflict and confrontation are inevitable, because there are silos, and some natural frictions between different functional goals or internal competitions for limited business resources. There are too many enterprise functional dialects such as tech talks, finance talks, manufacturing talk, etc, but not enough cross-domain business talks coupled with a lack of operational transparency which only enlarges the gaps between different business functions. To deal with silos, conflicts or confrontations smoothly, strong governance practices enable seamless alignment which goes beyond conformity and order taking, fostering a close partnership with interpersonal communication, value analytics, and trust building.

One point of struggles is governance taking away liberties that are essential to people doing their works innovatively or making change flexibly. You need to broaden the perspectives, leverage understanding of the hyper-connectivity and interdependencies between different components for collaborative problem-solving. There is a symbiotic relationship between various teams across organizations which leads to realization of higher business goals. Conflicts or confrontations should be handled wisely. There should be a governance mechanism embedded in crucial business processes so conflicts can lead to open communication, stimulate creative thoughts and lead to the company scope of collaboration; create a sense of positive competition in the team, across teams or across functions for improving business fluidity and performance.

Integral governance improves business agility: Nowadays there are so many things going on in the business, with so many distractions or disruptions. The organization has limited resources and they can’t grasp all emerging opportunities or preventing different risks on the way to move forward. The imbalanced business priority will perhaps get the business stuck and make the business fragile, and cause the business to fall into the “busyness” cycle. When the company seems to get stalled, workplace is stale, and the organization turns to be fragile. In addition, the overly rigid process is an outcome of applying rigid process approaches where they don't belong, and systems errors will cause revenue leakage and damage the business's reputation for the long run. The entire point of any governance discipline is to optimize decision making. A good governance standard provides a common corporate "language" and work instructions to decide and take smart actions; an integral governance approach inspect and improve both hard and soft business success factors for improving overall business manageability.

Governance is about how well an organization is being run and if set upright, it should effectively oversee the achievement of the vision, strategy, and objectives. It is an internal control to monitor the path of iterative strategy management continuum. In order to adapt to the faster changes, some organizations run with a hybrid speed, separating the exploitation of the existing technologies, methods, and practices from the exploration of new ways to run businesses. Besides principles, processes, and practice, enhancement, optimization, engagement, motivation, etc, are all crucial soft success factors of strong governance to strike the right balance of business acceleration and stability, flexibility and standardization, creativity and process.

Sound governance is to harness people-centricity by increasing process transparency and improving risk-intelligence. Solid GRC to make complex things less complex and improve business maturity. The governance rules include, but are not limited to improving the success rate of business strategy implementation, monitoring management performance and ensuring business effectiveness and resilience.

Posted in: Agile,GRC