The Governance Gap

Everyone can start something. Almost nobody can stop something. That asymmetry is the gap. · Juan Vegarra

In most companies, starting an initiative takes one enthusiastic executive. Stopping one takes a committee.

That asymmetry explains more failed technology spend than any technical decision ever will. It's not that organizations pick badly. It's that they can't unpick.

Where the gap actually sits

Ask who approves new spend and you'll get a clear answer. There's a threshold, a process, a form, a meeting. Approval is a designed system.

Ask who is accountable for stopping spend that isn't working and the room gets vague. Finance will say it's the business owner. The business owner will say it's governance. Governance will say they review annually. The annual review looks at what's proposed, not what's running.

So the stopping decision has no home. And a decision with no home doesn't get made, it gets deferred, and deferral looks identical to approval on the bank statement.

Two failure modes it protects

The activity trap survives this way. An initiative with no unit attached can't fail a review, because there's nothing to fail against. It renews by default.

The ownerless pilot survives the same way. Cancelling requires someone to say the thing didn't pan out, in a room containing the person who championed it. That's a social cost. Renewing is free.

Both failure modes are, from the inside, entirely rational behaviour. Nobody is being lazy. The system rewards continuation and charges for termination, and people respond to that the way people always do.

What actually closes it

I've seen three things work, and one of them is much better than the other two.

The weak version is a stage gate. Initiatives get reviewed at fixed points and must clear a bar to continue. Better than nothing. In practice, gates get soft, because the reviewers are the sponsors.

The middle version is a sunset default. Every initiative expires on a date unless someone actively renews it with evidence. This flips the burden, which is the important part. Continuation now costs something and termination is free.

The strong version is a named skeptic. One person, senior enough to be uncomfortable, whose explicit job in the review is to argue for killing things. Not a devil's advocate as a rhetorical exercise. A real role with a real mandate, rotated so it doesn't become a personality.

I sat in that seat on a board once and it was the least popular I've ever been in a governance meeting. It was also the meeting where we saved the most money.

The honest cost

This has a downside and it's worth naming. A hard stopping discipline kills some things that would have worked. Not many, but some, and you rarely find out which.

I still think it's the right trade at almost any scale, because the cost of the alternative compounds. An initiative that should have died in year one doesn't cost you year one. It costs you every year until someone finally does the unpleasant thing, plus the attention of everyone assigned to it, plus the credibility you spend defending it.

On Monday

Find out who, by name, is accountable for stopping a running initiative. If the answer takes more than a sentence, you've found the gap.

Then set an expiry date on everything currently running. Not a review date. An expiry, where doing nothing means it ends.

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Juan Vegarra is the author of An Outsider’s Playbook. The views here are his own. More essays · Advisory · Write me