This is a living document that is being adjusted and added to as the project develops...

Governance is a neutral term

• Governance encompasses all the things that need to be in place for people to work together.
• Governance is a core process, that allows other processes to work.
• It is often thought of just as what happens in board meetings, but it goes far beyond that to include the formal and informal structures, policies, practices, relationships and cultural expectations that determine how decisions are made, roles and resources are allocated and collaborative activity happens.
• The #BeyondTheRules project suggests that the following factors play a key role in systems of governance: accountability, responsibility, risk-holding, power and autonomy and that “looking at how these factors are balanced and distributed across a system can help to reveal how (in)justly and/or (in)effectively governance might play out in a system”. See here for more on this.

Our current experience of governance is often oppressive / regressive

• The wider system inevitably shows up in the governance adopted by individual organisations and groups. While governance can traditionally be seen as being about formal control, a systems perspective tells us that much of what happens in any system is beyond the control of individual actors.
• Many (all?) of the governance models and practices most currently accept as ‘normal’, operate in ways that reinforce and give effect to the unhealthy power dynamics present in our wider system.
• For example, in the UK charity sector, a formula developed for the British museum in the 19th Century, with all of its assumptions of class, colonialism and control, is still the necessary legal minimum our entities charged with acting in the public benefit must have. Laying a Cartesian grid of cause and effect over what we know to be a complex system of interactions, and then inviting a group of people together three or four times a year to ensure it’s all running smoothly, is anachronistic at best and an absolute barrier to social change at worst.
• Our current way of "doing" governance prioritises structure - a structure is a calcified system which (in many models) doesn’t change easily, but necessitates the continuation of status quo as default. The responsibility, and therefore focus, of those charged with the governance of an organisation, is often preservation.
• The institutionalisation of communal good has in many ways forced how we see and measure and act out socially beneficial elements into tools, mechanisms and structures of power. In effect, the manifestation of one group of people’s view of good on others’ behalf.

Governance can be transformational

This inquiry is rooted in two complementary hypotheses:

1. If we are seeking to change the world, we need to actively shift the ways we work together and
2. Shifting the way we work together can catalyse and support wider transformation

We use the term Transformational Governance to describe governance that is explicitly designed to disrupt the way power operates in our dominant system, support healthy collaboration across difference and bring about just and resilient outcomes

Transformational governance... (note the list below definitely needs further refinement, is certainly not exhaustive and may not be true!)

• Supports people to tune into, and be guided by, the purpose of their collective endeavour rather than by their ego or defences, bringing their whole selves into the process.
• Ensures power is visible, distributed and flows around the system to energise and unlock what is needed for the collective endeavour to move forward.