Co-designing your governance

Governance is inherently relational: it's at least as much to do with good listening, curiosity and trust as it is to do with process. We can design governance that enables and assures delivery, with relational behaviours at it's heart.

The way you design and deliver your governance sets the tone for your partnership. Doing this collaboratively will help build equity and accountability across commissioners and partners.

Effective governance in relational-contracts:

• Enables teams to work in new ways (important when you are introducing formal-relational contracting)
• Focuses on enabling delivery, and solving problems quickly and responsively
• Ensures delivery remains connected to the outcomes you are working towards
• Prioritises transparency and openness as a fundamental mechanism for driving up quality and trust
• Brings leaders closer to delivery, as opposed to abstracting it into reports for the boardroom
• Builds a shared sense of responsibility across leaders and practitioners

• Surface values, experience and expectations of governance in early market engagement to uncover tensions and start to build shared expectations
• Use your vision and principles to inform your governance design
• Design your governance collaboratively and in partnership
• Make your decision making processes visible and transparent
• Spend time consciously shaping how your governance meetings will run to enable clarity, openness and space for the most important matters to rise to the top
• Things will go wrong, we are all humans. Define your conflict resolution, mediation and escalation processes upfront, so everyone knows what to expect. Test them together in scenario planning.
• Centre user needs in your governance: how often are you e.g. seeing and sharing user research insights, and spending time with users?
• Prioritise and optimise for openness; proactively make information about what you are doing as visible as you possibly can
• Seek and design opportunities to share learning throughout your governance

Here are some useful references and exercises to help you:

1. Use the TRIZ Liberating Structure to explore what might be getting in your way
2. What it means in practice - and why it matters - to 'work in the open'

• Governance as a service by Richard Mclean 
• Why governance is good by Cate McLaurin

• As with most things, it helps to regularly reflect on how your governance is working so that you can iterate it to better meet your collective needs
• It's okay - and in fact we encourage you - to adopt forms of governance that feel less formal, like retrospectives, weeknotes and show and tells, to enable greater pace and transparency

• Over-focusing on the structure of governance rather than on your principles and expectations of how you will work together
• Forgetting that governance is a service to the partnership, and not a rigid set of processes
• Designing in too many governance layers which adds burden to teams and the partnership and slows down delivery