The defined structure through which an organisation or programme makes and oversees decisions: which bodies exist, what each can decide, how issues escalate, and how decision-makers are held to outcomes.
Ask where a decision will be made and most organisations point to a committee. Ask where the last three comparable decisions were actually made and a different map appears. The governance model is only real if the two maps match.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
One confidential brief lets the Global Board examine the structure a critical decision will pass through, before it does.
Bring independent operator perspectives into this decisionA governance model specifies the architecture of deciding: the forums (board, executive committee, investment committee, steering groups), the decision rights each holds, the thresholds that route a matter to one forum rather than another, escalation paths, meeting cadence, and the information each body is entitled to see. It exists at corporate level and, in miniature, inside every major programme.
Decision quality is usually discussed as a property of people, but structure decides what those people get to work with: whether challenge happens before or after commitment, whether the forum reviewing a proposal is independent of the team advocating it, whether anyone owns the outcome once the meeting ends. A sound model places each decision at the level holding the information and the accountability. A poor one routes everything upward until executives are approving choices they lack context for, at a pace that guarantees the approvals are ceremonial. When a major commitment is being prepared, the governance question is as material as the commercial one: who decides, on what evidence, against whose challenge?