What Is Decision Governance?

Decision Governance refers to values, principles, practices designed to improve the quality of decisions. You do decision governance any time you are trying to influence how specific decisions are made – steps those involved need to take, information they need to use, what they need to do with that information when preparing for a decision, what they are responsible for prior to, and after the decision is made, and so on.

There is a lot of decision governance around, even if it is not necessarily called that. When you participate in elections, you are subject to rules that define how elections are conducted: who has the right to vote, how voting is done, how votes are counted, how votes are communicated. When you want to obtain a mortgage, the financial institution’s staff will follow specific steps and apply documented rules to determine how much and under which conditions you can borrow. When you are forecasting the revenue from a product, there will usually be rules for who reviews and approves that forecast. 

Decision governance is not everywhere. Many decisions, if not most that we make daily, are not subject to explicit rules which we consistently abide by. When I’m planning to travel, I do have preferences, expectations, am subject to constraints I cannot influence, and so on, but I don’t really have a documented set of rules I’m following, and which are shaping my expectations and preferences.

Not all decision making is governed, and not all decision making needs to be governed. Governance needs to be useful to be preserved, and it is useful only if it improves the quality of decisions, that is, ultimately, of the outcomes of decisions. This can be accomplished through governance by, for example, changing what information is used when preparing a decision, how we develop decision options, how we assess and possibly influence preferences, constraints, and expectations, whom we give rights to take the decision, how we identify stakeholders of a decision, and many more.

The topic of decision governance is of interest to professionals who hold authority to make decisions, their advisors, and stakeholders who may want to influence how decisions are made, perhaps because they see ways to get better outcomes or mitigate undesirable consequences.

My texts on decision governance should be interesting to you if you need to put in place rules for how some specific decisions need to be made, if you need to change rules that may be in place, and, or if you need to assess the value of existing rules that govern decision making in a particular situation. 

This text is part of the series on the design of decision governance. Decision Governance refers to values, principles, practices designed to improve the quality of decisions. Find all texts on decision governance here, including “What is Decision Governance?” here.

My aim when I write about decision governance is to be neutral: I assume that there are no universal values, principles, and practices for how to govern decision making. Decision governance is a tool, and should be designed to achieve desired outcomes of decisions better, faster, with fewer resources. Decision governance serves values that benefit decision makers and decision stakeholders. What may be very desirable and high performing decision governance for some may, at the same time, be perceived as very damaging for others. 

My attempt at neutrality does not mean that I hold no opinions, or have no preferences over alternative ways of governing decision making; instead, it means that the discussion is richer and less naive when very different perspectives are considered and confronted.

I wrote most of the texts on Decision Governance in 2024. At that time, the term, “decision governance” was not broadly used. Judging by Google Trends, for example, it is related to 5-10 times fewer searches than “decision theory”, and 50-100 times fewer searches than “decision making” per day, in the period from 2019 through 2024. 

Popularity and relevance are different things – the numbers underestimate the impact decision governance has, and can have when done better.