The Accidental CIO

7How We Govern

Productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is.

—Eli Goldratt

Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don't complain about illogical behavior.

—Eli Goldratt

Control the organisation with arbitrary measures and, in fact, you actually diminish control. Or control the organisation with measures related to purpose used where the work is done, and you will achieve genuine control and what's more, your people will innovate.

—John Seddon

Fundamentally, governance is about “doing the right things” and “doing the things right.” The traditional governance methods are predominantly focused on control and compliance rather than value creation, and on the fundamental premise that work is predictable. While suitable in simple problem contexts, this is not an effective way to manage work in a rapidly evolving environment increasingly defined by complex problems where work is emergent in nature. The result of this rigid approach is that an organization does not have visibility on how effective its investments are, only how well it is at adhering to a forecasted plan, budget, and scope. Fixed long-term planning denies us the opportunity to change direction at speed if our context changes or our assumptions turn out to be incorrect. This inability to quickly adapt is the failure of a traditional portfolio management approach.

If we want true organizational agility to adapt to changes ...