Governance without Managers

Governance – every organization needs it, and few topics inside organizations create as much unease. Precisely because it shapes who holds power and how decisions are made, governance is both essential and, for many, too daunting to challenge. The word alone evokes a landscape of friction: paperwork that outpaces purpose, processes that substitute ritual for reflection, and a sense that policy gatekeepers are deeply disconnected from the realities of actual work. Yet beneath all this, governance should be something much more vital: the heartbeat of collective direction and coherence, the ongoing negotiation of risk, priority, and responsibility. The tragedy of our time – now, when we need good governance most – is that it has become a byword for bureaucracy, rather than the craft of sense-making and leading collective efforts toward value, its real reason for existing.

For decades, our approach to governance crystallized around control, predictability, and the avoidance of disaster. The logic was clear enough: in a world defined by clear boundaries and gradual change, the challenge was to ensure compliance, prevent failure, and create a chain of traceability for every significant decision. In this setting, rules and checklists made sense; they promised stability through transparency and consistency. Yet that same promise, when stretched across today’s landscapes of speed and complexity, quickly dissolves into illusion. The environment organizations face now is one where boundaries are porous, risk emerges from unexpected directions, and the greatest threats often defy categorization until it’s too late. In this world, the familiar apparatus of governance – static rules, sign-offs, audits – serves less as a safeguard than as a comfort blanket, shielding us from the hard work of confronting the unknown.

So what is governance, really, when we strip away the rituals and inherited forms? At its core, governance is the continuous act of making sense together in uncertainty. It is the architecture of attention and decision – how a group notices, interprets, and responds to what matters most, before and as events unfold. It is about surfacing the tensions and paradoxes that every organization must navigate: how much risk to tolerate, how much freedom to grant, how to maintain coherence without choking adaptability. These questions are not the province of a board, a compliance officer, or a management layer; they are everyone’s concern, woven into every significant choice a group makes. They cannot be answered by referencing the past alone, nor can they be outsourced to procedure. Instead, they demand distributed vigilance, honest assessment of outcomes, shared understanding of context and intent, the humility to accept the limitations of our understanding, and the willingness to adapt as reality moves beyond our models.

It is tempting to dismiss the legacy of compliance and formal oversight as mere dead weight. But these older forms did serve a real purpose: they created guardrails in a slower, more predictable era, enabling organizations to grow and protect themselves against familiar threats. What has changed is not the necessity for coherence or accountability, but the speed and ambiguity with which risks manifest. Today, vulnerabilities emerge less from individual error and more from systemic complexity, interdependence, and blind spots. A new technology might rewrite action boundaries before the ink dries on a policy. Social expectations shift, and the license to operate disappears overnight. The risks that matter most now are not on the checklist – they are in the blind spots between roles, in the gaps between intention and action, in the silent drift of purpose over time.

Governance, then, is not about checking work after the fact, but about embedding the capacity for sensing, learning, and adaptation directly into the fabric of how organizations operate. It is not a layer to be imposed, but an environment to be cultivated – a culture where information moves freely, surprises are surfaced early, and the question “What is really happening here?” is alive at every level. In this way, governance becomes less a matter of control and more an architecture for collective intelligence. It is present in how a team debates a risky course of action, how dissent is treated not as threat but as an early warning system, how new knowledge is integrated before habits ossify. In the best organizations, governance is visible not in documents or review cycles, but in the lived experience of open negotiation and ongoing calibration. People close to the action are trusted to interpret the boundaries, improvise ethically, and update their choices as new realities emerge.

This new landscape renders the traditional separation between “managing” and “doing” obsolete. The age of pure managers – those who coordinate and control without being directly involved in the work – is ending. Today, responsibility for outcomes must sit in the same hands as those shaping and delivering the work. Governance is not a remote function; it is lived, negotiated, and re-balanced on the ground, in real time. Those who do the work, together with those directly and indirectly affected by it, must critically reflect outcomes and side effects, bring forward concerns and disagreements, and realign direction through open, ongoing dialogue. The focus shifts from managing tasks to navigating tensions, from enforcing compliance to fostering productive dissent and continuous realignment of mutual interests and intent.

Implementing such dynamic governance requires new mechanisms and practices:

• Feedback and adaptation cycles must be fast, participatory, and inclusive.
• Clear protocols are essential for involving stakeholders at all levels – whether they are makers, users, customers, partners, or those whose legitimate interests are negatively affected. 
• Open digital channels become the backbone for surfacing issues, sharing information, and tracing legitimate objections through to resolution.
• Instead of burying dissent or treating it as a problem, the system follows each valid objection through to a shared decision, often by consent rather than by majority or fiat. 
• Where conflicts persist and can’t be resolved by the teams themselves, organizations require neutral, trusted panels – organizational “juries” – capable of mediating and settling disputes on principle rather than power.
• The heart of this system is ongoing dialogue among equals: a continuous process of negotiating and re-balancing competing interests, in which authority and learning are always being renewed.

Many of these elements have existed in some form for decades, and there is plenty of experience to draw upon. What’s different now is the mandate to systematically integrate them all into a living, adaptive system. This means sharing power at the edges and bottom of organizations, instead of hoarding it at the top. Authority, in an adaptive organization, is no longer something you inherit, appoint, or delegate. Titles are irrelevant. Position grants no legitimacy to automatically wield power. Instead, authority is something you earn and renew only through contribution, action, transparency, and accountability. The right to guide or decide is earned, not assigned, anchored only in demonstrated commitment and the willingness to be held accountable in the open.

This is not fiction. Organizations like Haier, Morning Star, and ET Group prove adaptive, manager‑free governance can scale. Here’s how this looks in practice: Haier, the global appliance maker, dismantled its hierarchy and replaced it with thousands of self-organizing micro-enterprises. Each team makes its own commitments, negotiates directly with customers and partners, and is held accountable for outcomes in the open – governance emerges continuously from those closest to the action. At Morning Star, the world’s largest tomato processor, there are no formal bosses or titles. Every employee negotiates peer-to-peer commitments and is directly responsible for outcomes. Governance happens through transparent agreements and constant feedback – accountability is local, authority is earned, and decisions flow to those doing the work. ET Group, based in Canada, operates with circle‑based governance. Teams self‑organize with no traditional managers, relying on transparent advice and consent processes to make decisions, set roles, and align around client outcomes. Accountability and authority are distributed directly to those doing the work.

Of course, this kind of governance is demanding. It requires clarity of purpose that goes deeper than slogans, boundaries that are explicit but open to revision, and a willingness to hold paradoxes rather than chase easy resolution. Freedom and accountability are always in tension; speed must be balanced with the courage to deliberately slow down when the stakes demand it; transparency must be practiced without drowning everyone in noise. There are no perfect formulas – only the ongoing work of designing and redesigning how we notice, decide, and align.

Leaders, in this context, are no longer the sole custodians of governance. Their work is to host and steward the conversations that keep sense-making alive, to invite challenge rather than manage it away, to model the courage to abandon what no longer serves. Governance at depth is not a state to be achieved but a practice to be sustained. It is a measure of whether an organization can remain honest with itself under pressure – true to its purpose not by clinging to past precedent, but by engaging reality as it actually is.

To take governance seriously is to make it visible and open, to revisit the structures of authority and learning before they fall out of sync with reality. In a world where surprise is the norm and the consequences of denial are catastrophic, the only governance worth having is the kind that remains alive and in sync with its environment – distributed, adaptive, and relentlessly oriented toward sense-making, value creation, and action. Anything less is not just insufficient, but dangerous.

We wrote this article for the Management Summit 2025 in Lisbon.
Read it here.

Image: Management Summit