Perhaps the most fundamental insight about governance theatre lies in this simple truth: governance processes frequently serve as poor substitutes for genuine accountability.
This distinction – between governance and accountability – explains why organizations can simultaneously invest enormous resources in governance frameworks while experiencing repeated failures in delivering expected outcomes.
To put it bluntly: While the profit centres are driven by rewarded accountability, cost centres use governance to protect from the threat of punishment.
This stark contrast in motivational frameworks explains much about the dysfunctional relationship between business and technology functions in many organizations.
The Governance-Accountability Gap
Governance consists of structures, processes, and audited artifacts designed to guide decision-making and ensure proper oversight. These include committees, approval gates, documentation requirements, review cycles, and reporting frameworks. Accountability, by contrast, is about consequences tied to outcomes – the clear connection between decisions, actions, and results, with appropriate rewards or corrective measures based on those results.
The critical insight is that these two concepts, while related, are fundamentally different:
- Governance focuses on how decisions should be made
- Accountability focuses on what happens after decisions are implemented
Organizations often invest heavily in the former while neglecting the latter. They create elaborate governance mechanisms that dictate how decisions should be approached, documented, reviewed, and approved – but then fail to establish clear ownership of outcomes or meaningful consequences tied to results.
The Profit Centre-Cost Centre Motivational Divide
This governance-accountability gap manifests as a profound motivational divide between business profit centres and cost centres:
Profit centres operate on reward-oriented accountability: Underwriters, traders, sales executives, and product managers work in environments where success is clearly defined, visibly measured, and directly rewarded. Their accountability frameworks emphasize the upside-bonuses, recognition, advancement, and increased decision authority when outcomes are positive.
Cost centres operate on punishment-avoidance governance: Technology functions typically work in environments where success is ambiguously defined, difficult to attribute, and rarely celebrated with the same enthusiasm as business wins. Their governance frameworks emphasize downside protection – reviews, approvals, documentation, and process compliance designed primarily to avoid blame when things go wrong.
This asymmetry creates fundamentally different behavioural dynamics:
- Business professionals are incentivized to make decisive calls, take calculated risks, and pursue clear targets
- Service professionals are incentivized to seek consensus, distribute responsibility, and prioritize defensibility over optimal outcomes
It’s not that profit centres lack governance or that cost centres lacks accountability. Rather, the primary motivational framework in each domain creates different defaults, different risk calculations, and different decision-making patterns.
As one veteran CIO memorably observed: “In the business, they get champagne for their wins and coaching for their losses. In IT, we get silence for our wins and autopsies for our losses.”
This motivational divide helps explain why bridging business and IT remains challenging despite decades of effort. It’s not just about communication styles or technical knowledge – it’s about fundamentally different reward systems and risk perceptions that shape behaviour at a subconscious level.
Why Governance Expands While Accountability Contracts
Several factors drive organizations to substitute governance for accountability:
The Visibility Asymmetry
Governance processes are highly visible. They produce tangible artifacts: committee structures, approval workflows, documentation templates, review checklists. These visible elements can be demonstrated to auditors, regulators, and executives as evidence of “proper controls.”
Accountability systems are less visible. They consist primarily of relationships, expectations, and consequences that often remain implicit rather than explicitly documented. When an organization wants to show it’s “taking something seriously,” creating new governance is easier to demonstrate than strengthening accountability.
The Timing Advantage
Governance happens before outcomes are known. It can be implemented and showcased immediately, providing quick evidence of “taking action” when problems arise. Accountability necessarily follows results, which may take months or years to materialize. This delayed nature makes accountability less attractive as an immediate response to concerns about control or oversight.
The Comfort Factor
Governance distributes responsibility across groups, processes, and documentation. This distribution creates comfort through shared ownership—no single person bears full responsibility for outcomes. Accountability concentrates responsibility with specific individuals for specific outcomes. This concentration creates discomfort, as it requires people to accept clear ownership of results that involve risk and uncertainty.
The Structural Simplicity
Governance can be established through organizational edicts—creating new committees, mandating new reviews, requiring new documentation. These structural changes can be implemented through formal authority. Accountability requires cultural and behavioural changes—establishing consequences, consistently applying them, and creating psychological safety for honest assessment. These changes cannot simply be mandated; they must be cultivated.
The Consequences of the Substitution
When organizations substitute governance for accountability, several predictable dysfunctions emerge:
Process Compliance Replaces Outcome Responsibility
Success becomes defined as adherence to the governance process rather than achievement of intended results. Teams optimize for meeting documentation requirements, obtaining necessary approvals, and navigating review processes—regardless of whether these activities contribute to better outcomes. The focus shifts from “Did we achieve what we intended?” to “Did we follow the required process?” This shift undermines the very purpose governance was meant to serve.
Form Displaces Substance
As governance expands, the quality of its content often diminishes. Documentation becomes performative rather than informative. Reviews become superficial rather than substantive. Approvals become rubber stamps rather than meaningful evaluations. The system optimizes for the appearance of control rather than its reality. The more elaborate the governance framework becomes, the more resources it consumes—and the less capacity remains for thoughtful analysis or rigorous evaluation.
Accountability Dissipates
Most critically, clear accountability for outcomes becomes increasingly difficult to establish. When something goes wrong, the question is no longer “Who was accountable for this result?” but rather “Was the governance process followed correctly?”. If the process was followed, failure becomes an acceptable outcome—an unfortunate result despite “doing everything right.” If the process wasn’t followed, the failure is attributed to process non-compliance rather than poor judgment or execution. Either way, meaningful accountability for outcomes dissolves, replaced by accountability for process adherence.
Real-World Manifestations
This governance-accountability substitution manifests in countless ways across organizations:
The Project Post-Mortem Ritual
When projects fail to deliver expected value, the typical response is to examine whether proper governance was followed. Was the business case complete? Were risks properly documented? Did appropriate stakeholders sign off?
Rarely does the analysis focus on whether individuals made good decisions given what they knew, or whether they responded appropriately as new information emerged. The assessment centres on process compliance, not judgment quality.
The Governance Expansion Reflex
When significant failures occur, the reflexive response is to add more governance: additional review gates, more detailed documentation requirements, expanded committee oversight. This approach assumes that the failure resulted from insufficient process rather than insufficient accountability.
This reflex explains why governance frameworks tend to grow continuously over time, while accountability mechanisms remain relatively static.
The Blame-Free Culture Distortion
Many organizations advocate for a “blame-free culture” where failures are treated as learning opportunities rather than occasions for punishment. This healthy principle becomes distorted when it transforms into a “consequence-free culture” where outcomes are disconnected from any personal responsibility.
In such environments, governance becomes the ultimate shield against consequences—if the process was followed, no one can be held accountable for poor outcomes.
Restoring the Balance: Governance with Accountability
Effective organizations recognize that governance without accountability can become theatre, while accountability without governance is chaos. They seek to integrate these elements rather than substitute one for the other.
Several approaches help restore this balance:
1. Outcome Ownership Over Process Compliance
Create clear ownership of outcomes, not just process steps. Identify who is accountable for results at each level, with explicit understanding of what success looks like and how it will be measured.
This doesn’t mean punishing people for factors beyond their control, but it does mean evaluating the quality of decisions and actions given what was known at the time.
2. Governance as Enabler, Not Substitute
Frame governance explicitly as a support for accountability, not a replacement for it. Each governance mechanism should be justified based on how it enables better decisions or outcomes, not merely how it demonstrates control.
When governance elements don’t clearly contribute to better results, they should be questioned regardless of how reassuring they might seem.
3. Proportional Consequences
Establish proportional consequences—both positive and negative—tied to outcomes and decision quality. These need not be draconian to be effective; even moderate differentials in recognition, influence, or opportunity based on results can significantly impact behaviour.
The goal isn’t punishment but rather creating meaningful feedback that shapes future decisions and actions.
4. Process Evaluation by Results
Evaluate governance processes themselves based on outcomes, not just adherence. Do projects that follow the process produce better results than those that don’t? Does the governance framework lead to improved decision quality over time?
If the answer is no, the governance framework is failing at its fundamental purpose, regardless of how comprehensive or well-documented it might be.
5. Transparency Over Control
Focus governance on creating transparency rather than control. Governance mechanisms that make information visible, clarify assumptions, and surface risks enable accountability without replacing it.
This approach shifts governance from directing specific actions to ensuring those actions are visible and their consequences traceable.
Conclusion: The Courageous Choice
The substitution of governance for accountability isn’t merely a structural problem—it’s a courage problem. Accountability requires the courage to:
- Assign clear ownership in the face of uncertainty
- Assess performance based on outcomes, not just intentions
- Apply consequences proportionate to responsibility
- Accept personal responsibility for results within one’s control
Governance processes often expand precisely because they offer an alternative to these uncomfortable requirements. They create the comforting illusion of control without the discomfort of consequential responsibility.
Organizations that recognize this pattern can make a different choice. They can build governance systems that support genuine accountability rather than replacing it. They can create processes that enhance decision quality without diffusing responsibility. They can establish frameworks that make ownership clearer rather than more ambiguous.
This choice requires courage—from leaders who must assign and accept clear accountability, from governance bodies that must prioritize substance over form, and from individuals who must embrace ownership in the face of uncertainty.
But it’s a choice that transforms governance from theatre into genuine organizational capability. And in a world where results matter more than appearances, it’s the only sustainable choice.
This is what Transformation Architecture addresses: not just what governance structures exist, but how accountability flows through them. The Δ β α framework (see Frameworks) explicitly separates governance intent (Δ), behavioural expectations (β), and accountability management (α) precisely to prevent the substitution described here.