#BeyondtheRules — Balanced governance and ‘behaving well’ everywhere, every day.
#BeyondtheRules is a collaborative exploration around ‘public good’ governance held from summer 2020 to summer 2021 between Black Thrive, York MCN, Democratic Society, Dark Matter Labs and Lankelly Chase.
Our original enquiry for this project started with a premise that our governance and categorisation of ‘public good’ (intended collective benefit) is unfit for the (complex, systemic) challenges we face. More about that here.
On Governance
Governance is a seemingly innocuous term, one that can seem to mean everything and nothing simultaneously.
Alain Deneault in “Gouvernance — Le Management Totalitaire” explores how the term has in some ways removed politics from deeply political subjects.
Deneault draws the word governance back to its evolution in 15th century France, with the meaning of “behaving well”, which was never used as a political term but as an invitation for passive behaviour. He looks at how the business community adopted the use of the word in turn, — this time making it a synonym for integrity and rigour in the management of private entities. When we bring the term to the public sphere, he states that it has been used:
“to clean up the history of what depoliticizes it: the passions, the affects, the cries of the heart, the refusals, the newly articulated true thoughts, the interpositions, the uprisings, the sudden ripostes, the indignant slingshots, the words that seek each other, the modalities of intervention that are invented, when there are not finally chastened proposals that adequately criticize the regime where its lures prevail, supporting the postulates of a possible alternative.”
In organisations, it has become a term that we associate with meetings and decisions that take place in the boardroom, rather than a question for all of us, every day.
Over the last year, we’ve looked at what it means to consider governance not as something separate to our day-to-day, but as a system of many interconnected parts — from individual behaviours to organising systems to structural deep codes — which together make up how we collectively behave. ‘Behaving well’, here is not separate from politics or a matter of avoiding conflict, but a deep question of directly facing the realities ahead of us in all that entails for a just, livable future. Not in the boardroom but by all of us, everywhere, every day.
In this blog, we’ll share some of the headline factors that we notice to play a key role in a system of governance. We’ll explore how these are connected to many other parts, and invite you to consider how they show up in your own setting. The factors we focus on here are accountability, responsibility, risk-holding, power and autonomy.
We are finding that looking at how these factors are balanced and distributed across a system can help to reveal how (in)justly and/or (in)effectively governance might play out in a system, enabling us to see more clearly the parts that are connected and how these could show up in a different way.
Balance: the balance of power, autonomy, responsibility, risk-holding and accountability in one actor
The understandings we apply when we use those terms are:
- Power ‒ the ability to shape conditions
- Autonomy ‒ the freedom to do things in a way that you deem fit
- Responsibility ‒ the burden/ability to take action
- Accountability ‒ the burden to justify your approach
- Risk-holding — bearing consequences of the results
Power, autonomy, responsibility, risk-holding and accountability show up as distinct, but deeply interconnected factors in a system that provide balance to one another. Power and autonomy, we might consider as enablers — factors that convey ability, ease and freedom. Accountability and risk-holding, we might consider as burdens — factors that place an onus on the actor (noting that this language just tries to convey whether the factor creates a freedom/ability or an onus; an enabling factor can still feel or be perceived as a burden and burdens may be embraced as an enabler, gift or honour). Responsibility can be both an enabler or/and a burden — it might be a freedom I choose to exercise; it might involve duties/actions that I need to fulfil. Where we experience an imbalance between the enablers and the burdens that actors may hold in a system, we see an environment conducive to corruption, inefficacy and/or injustice; conditions that erode trust and indeed our collective belief in that system.
For example, I might have the power to shape the outcome of, say, a COVID-19 procurement process, without risk-holding or accountability for the outcome ‒ this would be an imbalance in governance, in a way that allows for the prioritisation of personal interests over collective benefit.
Or I might have responsibility to, say, support somebody to secure work, without autonomy to provide that support in a way that I think would be genuinely effective and tailored to them. This would create a form of imbalance in governance which results in the loss of potential in my ability to innovate and improve things, resulting in that as a system we lose the chance to learn and grow.
As someone facing illness, I might bear the consequences (risk-holding) of a failing health system, with minimal power or autonomy to influence whether I can receive the treatment that I need; an imbalance of governance leading to injustice.
Conversely, when these factors come into balance, we can see how more fair, creative, effective and just conditions can become possible.
For example, where I have responsibility to design a programme intended for collective benefit, and also autonomy to do it in the way I see is best, I can innovate freely and bring my creativity and understanding to the challenge. This position may give me power in that system (ability to shape conditions). Where I also have risk-holding (I will directly bear consequences of negative results) and also accountability for the approach that I take, I am likely to consider risks and take informed and responsible directions. Thus, where I have a balance of power, responsibility, autonomy, risk-holding and accountability in a system, I am most likely to be able to take customised approaches that care for efficacy and plausibility of the result.
Distribution: the balance of power, autonomy, responsibility, risk-holding and accountability between actors
We also need to consider how these governance factors out between actors in a system.
Let us consider this in the context of an imagined charitable structure, for example, to help to illustrate what we mean by distribution. This table tries at a very headline and rough level to map out how power, accountability, power, autonomy and responsibility might lie across different actors in an example case.
Example of how governance might show up in a Charity by role
Power is spread somewhat across this structure but has particular accumulation in actors such as Trustees and senior executives. If these actors are not also the people who the charity is set up to support, we might find a scenario where power is concentrated in people who are furthest from the specifics and realities of the matter. Risks, meanwhile, may have a certain spread across the system, but since charities are by nature set up to support people who are already holding risks in the wider system — risks which can be exacerbated in the case of malfunction by the charity — the highest risk-holding may well be held by people that the charity is set up to support. Indeed, this may be more the case where that charity provides a critical function to people (for example, if a food bank is mismanaged and a result is that I can’t access food that I need, the consequences I bear could be significant. If a sports charity is mismanaged and my sports class is cancelled, the direct consequences to me might be disappointing but less severe).
When we look at the balance and distribution of governance in this structure we might consider:
- How can we better distribute the power across the system so that those closest to the details and specifics of the matter have the most power to shape direction and execution?
- How can we design the system so that risk held by people who the charity is set up to support is reduced or mitigated, and more evenly spread?
These are questions that nowadays charities are often expected to address in their fundamental governance set-up. What is clear is that trying to truly address these imbalances requires more than just some tweaks to the existing structure. Indeed, if the structure in place exists within the logic of traditional line management, rank and the bounded division of duties, this imbalance is coded into the architecture.
And yet, when we think about the huge transition that we have ahead of us for a just livable future to be possible, it is clear that we need to unleash the agency of every one of us to be able to take on responsibility, create with autonomy, be accountable, to take on risks and assume power — each uniquely, in ways that we determine — towards that future.
So if this rebalance in governance is critical and we truly want to address it, what sort of questions do we start to consider?
You might, say, start with a review at the structure of the organisation, starting perhaps with the Trustee Board, which — rather than holding a function of strategy and decision-making — could play a more valuable role as a governance auditor for the system. They could hold to account the integrity of the organisation’s governance to its mission, auditing the balance of power, accountability, autonomy, responsibility and risk-holding in the organisation and whether the organising methods are appropriate for it.
This would allow the strategic decision-making of the organisation to be concentrated in people closest to the questions they need to make decisions about. These people may be supported with information, protocols & considerations from a central team. Rather than ‘line managers’, central teams could actively work to compound learning within the ecosystem and across other partners and actors; who navigate the necessary compliance and regulation that the organisation sits within; and who actively consider how we carve pathways towards justice in the way that they approach the day to day work.
As we begin to unravel the traditional lines of fixed hierarchy, we start to consider what this means for how we approach pay. We begin to question what pay rewards or incentivises or what function it plays in a system. By linking pay to rank in a system we create a series of incentives to accumulate power and responsibility in a system even where it may not be our place; when we start to unpack this and reimagine its role it reveals questions about fairness, purpose, process, market norms, regulation and more for us to work through.
Decision-making, in turn, becomes a critical question, requiring us to reimagine who can take decisions and by which process in this more distributed system.
And as we start to think about shifting the processes, mechanisms and structures across an organisation or system, we quickly begin to reveal the deep codes that shape the scope of that change. The regulation, which — for example — prescribes what work a charity can engage in and the way that it must be reported and assessed. Accounting, which invites us to consider our financial progress according to profit and reserves rather than the value created for different actors in the system. Contract Law, Intellectual Property and many other codes that shape and constrain how and where we can reimagine how we show up.
Meanwhile, our charity does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in response to existing issues that often sit at a larger socioeconomic level. The weaker the collective infrastructure, the more risk is concentrated in particular individuals in a system. Having in place social infrastructure from universal healthcare, universal mental healthcare and universal basic income, can significantly mitigate the risk-holding that falls on individual shoulders. We begin to touch upon socioeconomic questions and what infrastructure we need to really enable a balanced governance in our systems.
This invites us to look at our mental models, narratives and our behaviours in this system, particularly the mental models that have underpinned structural systems of oppression — of class, gender, sexuality, health, race, ethnicity and more — that fundamentally undermine a chance at real justice. These might be mental models and narratives of stratification, white supremacy, extraction, command, control and separation.
Structural (and intergenerational) privilege facilitates actors to have more time, capacity, confidence, trust and safety, all of which in turn enable a person to accumulate (and sometimes hoard) power, autonomy, responsibility in a system over time. These inequalities aren’t just linear, but also geological; they are not behind us, they are embedded in the layers of rocks we are standing on.
All of these factors heavily shape the frameworks within which individual choices and their implications are shaped, all in different ways for each of us. Despite the constraints, human history is a story of constant resistance, re-imagination and reform. We can make the commitments — each in our own ways — to step into power (even where it is not welcomed), to step away from power (especially when it is not deserved), to hold oneself accountable (including when not externally mandated), to exert autonomy (including when not permissioned) and to take on or to mitigate risk.
Whatever the approach, one of the key threads through our enquiry is that how we show up at a personal level deeply influences how these patterns in governance shift, be that interrogating our mental models, conditions, trends, behaviours; embracing rest, joy, celebration, love; resisting, reimagining, committing and/or persisting.
About Beyond the Rules
In researching these question in #BeyondtheRules over the last year, we have been humbled to speak to individuals, groups and people from social organisations, movements, grantmaking bodies and others who have gradually been unpicking these questions — shifting the way they approach pay, incorporated lived experience into their decision making, taken a more distributed approach to power and accountability, reimagined the grantmaking relationship, campaigned for regulatory reform and more. Individuals and groups that, by acutely focusing on one piece of the jigsaw or looking holistically at many, have been moulding the forces at play.
As a group of partners in this project, we have been seeking to unravel and make sense of the interconnections between the many factors at play and how they interact, their histories and stories, who is working on them and what they are learning . We are currently writing up our findings to share with the hope that it might add a brick to the collective deep democratising that we need ahead.
Reflection: governance in your setting
As you head into this time over August, a period where you might have the ability to step back and listen more deeply, to breathe and have moments of silence, we invite you to reflect on some questions with us in relation to the governance in your own settings, wherever these may be (although we should note that these questions are more tailored to social organisations, movements or grantmakers than, say, public services):
On risk-holding, accountability and power:
- Who faces risks and who accrues benefits in the work that you do?
- What type of consequences, and to what degree?
- Who is currently asked to justify their approach and who is not?
Bear in mind that risk-holders and accountable actors in these situations may bear consequences affecting various factors, such as physical health, mental health, finances/wealth, relationships and social capital, time and energy, reputation, and/or current and future opportunities. They may be human or non-human actors, present-day or in the future.
- How (and how much) do structural factors (relating e.g. to regulation, social security, the economic market etc) influence how risk manifests in your system?
- How much is within your system’s scope to influence?
- What does it really mean for there to be a balance between who shapes the conditions of your work and who bears the potential consequences of it?
Consider how these questions leak into wider structural matters and how you are incorporating these factors into your work. Where are you focusing your sites of influence and are you thinking about how all of the issues interconnect.
Look to dig into ideas with curiosity. For example, somebody bearing consequences of a system may not always be well placed to have power over all parts of an action that affects them. For instance, I as a patient would bear the consequences of a poorly executed medical procedure, however it does not mean that I should carry out the procedure myself. I would, however, want to be free to decide whether I wanted that procedure, and would want to be able to trust that the person carrying it out has the sufficient knowledge and expertise to do it. I might also want patients like me to have been involved at some point in shaping some of the processes itself.
Where direct representation might not be possible, why is this (/has this been) the case, and what are the checks and balances needed to how conditions are shaped?
When thinking about representation, consider that groups of people are not homogenous. A woman can adopt a patriarchal ideology. A person of colour can internalise or even uphold ideas of white supremacy. A gay cis man can be unaware of his transphobia as much as anybody else outside the 2SLGBTQ+ umbrella. A working class person can be convinced to see immigrants as the economic problem in their country. So when we consider the important role of lived experience in governance, we can also ensure that decisions are shaped by people who bear or have borne consequences as well as the insights relating to the issue.
On responsibility and autonomy:
- How much autonomy is given to corresponding types of responsibility?
- How do you pay people for the types of responsibility taken? Does (if so, how?) structural privilege link to the roles that you reward the most?
- What other benefits do different people accrue as a result of the types of responsibility they hold (reputational, benefits, networks, opportunities…?)
People will likely have different types of responsibility that they hold. When you hold a meeting, who takes minutes, who makes coffee, who sets the agenda. Who holds responsibility for the overall integrity of the work. Who takes responsibility to communicate, to make relationships.
Reflect on how different types of responsibilities are incentivised or rewarded and how systems of oppression may influence the frameworks of choice that we have when considering to take on these different types.
If you can, draw what you see. Step into it. Embody it, or depict it. What comes to you as the fundamental changes that you may need to be considering. What do you see and feel?
After a year looking at ways that many people have approached answering these kinds of questions, we are excited to share with you some of our findings and to hear what is coming up for you.
We will be hosting a conversation on 2nd September at 2pm (UTC+1) to share more and to invite your contributions; we hope that you can join us. Quick registration here
This blog was authored by Annette Dhami, Thomas Theodore and Himanshu Rohilla of Dark Matter Labs (graphics by Sharmada Nagarajan) with the input and support from Natalie Creary of Black Thrive, Catherine Scott of York MCN, Alex Zur-Clark of Democratic Society and Joe Doran of Lankelly Chase.
Note that an edit was made to the introduction on 23rd September 2021 in order to better reflect Alain Deneault’s work.
