Ctrl + Alt + Govern

When people think of governance, they often think of business efficiency – discussions around streamlining operations, cost savings, reducing waste. From the outside looking in, that’s what the general public would think but as we know, dear reader, they are wrong. So, the question is, what’s the difference?

Governance is a framework of rules, relationships and processes within an organisation. Sometimes it’s multi-agency, operating across organisations or sectors, but whether it’s one agency or many, it’s about who has power, who makes decisions, how stakeholders are engaged and heard, and how accountability is ensured – it’s about thinking long-term and sustainability, it’s the “what” and the “why”. Governance is pro-active.  

Business efficiency is a management related issue; it’s focused on the “how” with operational execution, resource allocation, performance, KPIs, budgets, workflows. It’s generally internal to an organisation or a service, it’s about short to medium-term goals and outputs – sometimes it’s about fire fighting and crisis management – it’s reactive.

If it’s so easy to separate them on paper (or in writing), why are they blurred in practice? Why are strategic governance boards focused on business efficiency? Too many reasons to list here, probably a books worth (maybe I’ll write one someday…), but in essence I think it comes down to three (main) reasons:

1. The legacy of New Public Management (NPM)

When I was doing research for this blog, I came across New Public Management and I realised how little public management more broadly. NPM is best described as an “approach to public sector reform”. It’s not a single methodology or theory, but a collection of principles and practices. The idea was simple: run public services like private enterprises, with a focus on cost-cutting, performance metrics and streamlined operations. This really came to fruition in the 1990s, with influential scholar Christopher Hood, who really coined and conceptualised NPM. This, combined with a time where many governments faced economic crises and pressure to reduce public spending, public sector organisations were pushed – whether encouraged or outright mandated – to increase efficiency by adopting private business-like practices.

2. Language and semantics

This was one of my findings while I was doing my master’s dissertation – semantics. Terms like “governance”, “leadership” or “management” are often used interchangeably in policy documents, job descriptions and organisational strategies. This creates ambiguity around function, especially when governance boards are tasked with “driving performance” or “ensuring efficiency”, which are fundamentally managerial business efficiency concerns.

3. Cultural expectations

There is a belief, especially amongst the public and media, that good governance means control, costing savings, and quick results. When governance is mentioned in the media, it’s within the context of budget cuts or performance failures – governance is portrayed as the fix, the mechanism for control and cost savings.

Does efficiency mean success? Not necessarily, and especially not in public sector. When governance is reduced to a conversation about business efficiency, we risk missing its deeper purpose. Governance isn’t just about streamlining operations or cutting costs (although there is some space for these discussions within good governance); it’s about strategic direction, public accountability, and holistic decision making. When organisations don’t separate governance and business efficiency, governance boards start managing, and managers start governing – the liners blur. That’s when governance becomes inefficient, not because it’s slow or costly, but because it’s lost sight of its purpose: to ask are we doing the right things?, not just are we doing the things right?