Insight Diversity strategy and governance
What has no owner often ends up belonging to no one
“Everyone is responsible” can become an elegant way of not knowing precisely who has to act.
- Who prepares?
- Who decides?
- Who carries it out?
- Who escalates?
A REASSURING FORMULA
“It's everyone's responsibility.”
The sentence is sincere and often right in substance: the quality of inclusion practices does indeed depend on what each person does. It is also a convenient way of closing a difficult discussion about who is accountable for what.
The problem appears the day something has to be done. Data has to be compiled, a gap has to be analyzed, a decision has to be prepared for the committee. Everyone reasonably assumes it falls to someone else, and no one is wrong, since nothing was assigned.
A responsibility shared by everyone becomes a responsibility no one can be held to.
THE USEFUL DISTINCTION
Contributing to something and answering for it are not the same thing.
Many people contribute to a subject. One person has to answer for it. That asymmetry is not authoritarian: it is what allows everyone else to contribute usefully, because they know who to bring a question, a blockage or a proposal to.
Four verbs are generally enough to clarify a muddled situation. Who prepares the information? Who decides? Who carries it out? Who escalates when the decision exceeds their level? Once those four answers are known, most ambiguities disappear, and you often discover that two of them had never been stated.
WHAT THE VACUUM PRODUCES
A subject with no owner does not disappear. It slows down.
It keeps existing, keeps being mentioned in meetings, keeps appearing in documents. But it moves in fits and starts, carried by whoever has time or interest at that moment. Files of this kind are recognizable by one sign: their progress depends on the workload of a person who was never officially designated.
That way of working has a hidden cost. The person who in fact carries the subject carries it without a mandate, and therefore without the authority to make trade-offs and without formal recognition. They often end up exhausted or give up, and the file drops back to zero, without anything having been done wrong.
NAMING WITHOUT CONFISCATING
Designating an owner takes nothing away from anyone else.
The objection is common: naming someone risks letting the rest of the organization off the hook. It deserves to be taken seriously, because that effect is real: it is what you see when a committee becomes the exclusive owner of a subject.
But the opposite effect is far more frequent. Where a responsibility is clearly assigned, the other functions finally know who to talk to, what is expected of them, and what will be done with their contribution. Clarity does not concentrate commitment: it gives it an address.
On this subject, who prepares, who decides, who carries it out and who escalates?
When all four answers come without hesitation, governance exists. When one of them produces a silence, that is where the next decision has to be made.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full system, the steering loop and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Diversity strategy and governanceCONTINUE
Other insights on governance.
- Insight An indicator is only worth something if it can trigger a decision A number tracked every month but never discussed is not yet an instrument of governance.
- Insight A policy without governance is a documented intention A policy can be perfectly drafted and remain almost invisible in daily decisions.
- Insight An action plan is not a governance system A list of actions can be complete the day it is delivered and already fragile the following month.
- Insight The diversity committee must not become the owner of diversity The day the whole subject belongs to the committee, part of the organization can start believing it no longer belongs to them.