Decision Governance
Infrastructure, not advice
Decision governance is the system that determines who decides what, when decisions happen, how they get verified, and how the organisation remembers. It is not a framework you adopt. It is infrastructure you install.
Why governance, not coaching
Coaching gives you insight. Consulting gives you advice. Governance gives you infrastructure. The difference matters because insight and advice leave when the engagement ends. Infrastructure stays.
Most founders have spent significant money on external guidance that produced temporary clarity. The pattern repeats: hire an advisor, gain perspective, implement partially, drift back to old patterns. The problem was never the quality of the advice. It was the absence of a system to hold the decisions in place.
Decision governance is that system. It does not depend on any individual being in the room. It does not degrade when the engagement ends. It compounds over time because every recorded decision makes the next one faster and more informed.
The four pillars
Every decision governance system is built on four pillars. If any one is missing, the system collapses under its own weight.
Decision Rights
Who decides what?
Decision rights specify which person or role has the authority to make specific categories of decisions. Without written decision rights, every question routes to the founder. The founder becomes a bottleneck not because the team is incapable, but because nobody knows what they are permitted to decide.
Written decision rights cover: strategic decisions (founder only), operational decisions (delegated to roles), financial thresholds (tiered authority), and client-facing decisions (specified by scenario). Each category has an owner, a scope, and an escalation path.
Decision Cadence
When do decisions happen?
Cadence is the rhythm of decision-making. Without it, decisions happen reactively: triggered by urgency, pressure, or crisis rather than by a structured schedule. Reactive decision-making is always lower quality than deliberate decision-making.
A decision cadence specifies: daily decisions (operational, handled by the team), weekly decisions (tactical, reviewed in a standing meeting), monthly decisions (strategic, evaluated with data), and quarterly decisions (directional, requiring deeper analysis). Each rhythm has a format, an owner, and a verification step.
Decision Verification
How do we know it was right?
Verification is the most neglected pillar. Most organisations make decisions and never look back to assess whether they worked. Without verification, you cannot learn. You cannot improve. You cannot distinguish between good decisions with bad outcomes and bad decisions with lucky outcomes.
A verification protocol specifies: what gets verified (not everything), when it gets verified (at defined intervals), who verifies it (not the original decider), and what happens when verification fails (escalation or revision). This is not bureaucracy. It is the feedback loop that makes the system intelligent.
Decision Memory
How does the organisation remember?
Decision memory is the record of what was decided, why, by whom, and what happened as a result. Without it, organisations relitigate the same decisions repeatedly. New team members have no context. The same mistakes recur because nobody recorded the lesson.
A decision memory system includes: a decision log (what, who, when, context), outcome tracking (what happened), lesson extraction (what we learned), and retrieval (how we find past decisions when facing similar situations). This is the pillar that creates compounding returns. Every logged decision makes the organisation smarter.
How it compounds
Each pillar reinforces the others. Decision rights reduce bottlenecks, which means more decisions can happen within the cadence. Cadence creates regular verification points. Verification generates data for decision memory. Memory informs better decision rights. The system gets faster and more accurate with every cycle.
This is the fundamental difference between governance and advice. Advice is consumed. Governance accumulates. The first month of a governance installation is the least valuable. The twelfth month is the most valuable. The system compounds.
What this means for your business
If you currently have no written decision rights, no regular decision cadence, no verification protocol, and no decision memory system, you are operating on instinct. Instinct works when the business is small and the founder can hold everything in their head. It breaks when the business grows, when the founder gets tired, or when a second layer of leadership needs to make decisions without checking in.
Installing decision governance is not adding complexity. It is making the invisible structure visible. The decisions are already being made. The governance simply makes them deliberate, recorded, and verifiable.
See where your governance gaps are
The free diagnostic tests your decision infrastructure across the 9 Hell Events.
Run the Free Diagnostic