The Boring Bit That’s Anything But

By: Evan Leybourn

Let’s be honest: governance sounds dull. Policies, approvals, budget cycles — it’s the stuff leaders would rather delegate, ignore, or hide under a veneer of superficial change. But here’s the thing: governance is the boring bit that quietly decides whether your big change efforts take off or die in committee. Ignore it, and you get theater. Fix it, and you get momentum.

THE PATH WE'VE PAVED

Governance is the path people walk every day. Every approval, budget cycle, or decision right. If the path is well established and smooth, even if it heads straight into a ditch, people will keep following it. No motivational speech will change that.

If you want different behavior, don’t ask people to change. Rebuild the path under their feet.

CHANGE THE SYSTEM, CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR

Case in point: Bayer. 

When Bill Anderson took over as CEO in 2023, Bayer was drowning in lawsuits, expiring patents, and debt. Many leaders would have called it a “culture problem.” Anderson called it what it was: bureaucracy. And his diagnosis was blunt:

“Bureaucracy has put Bayer in a stranglehold. Our internal rules for employees span 1,362 pages. We have excellent people... trapped in 12 levels of hierarchy, which puts unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.” ~ Bill Anderson

So he tore it up. Five layers of management — gone. Annual budgeting replaced by 90-day cycles. He called the new model “Dynamic Shared Ownership.” Teams set their own priorities, resources, and structures. Compliance is the only checkpoint.

The result? Anderson shared one case where a local team was able to make all the decisions needed to quickly win back a major healthcare client. The sort that used to take 10 layers of approval. Anderson’s mantra sums it up: 

“Mechanics eat culture for dessert.” 

By expanding spans of control (the average manager has 15 direct reports, up from 5) and scrapping hierarchy-based job grades, Bayer made micromanagement structurally impossible.

DECISION RIGHTS AS A NUDGE

Decision rights are either friction or fuel. A few small nudges can flip the balance:

• Audit, not approval: Replace pre-approvals with post-audits for low-risk work.
• Time-bound: If no decision is made in X days, it’s automatically approved.
• Default to the edge: Push authority out; escalate only when risk truly demands it.

TRY THIS IN YOUR NEXT CHANGE

Forget the grand transformation plan for a minute. Governance is your lever. This is one of the main points that was built into our Rules without Roadblocks micro-course. 

So, ask yourself:

• What do our governance processes really cost?
• Which policies quietly sabotage change?
• Are we managing actual risk… or leadership anxiety?
• What if governance created speed instead of slowing us down?

Now experiment. Build small governance triggers that make the right action the easy action. Because when governance is designed well, change isn’t managed. It’s inevitable.

Evan Leybourn is the co-founder of the Business Agility Institute and a huge governance geek who believes that even tiny improvements can make a massive difference in creating a better and more human-centric business environment for everyone.

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