The steering committee meets every fortnight

Nothing gets decided.

Status by RAG. Budget against baseline. Risks and issues. Milestones, mostly amber, each with a line about recovery. It is well run. People prepare for it.

And when something hard comes up — the approval threshold two divisions want set differently, the scope item that was in and is now not, the report finance needs that the platform does not produce — it is noted. Taken offline. The project team will work through it and come back.

The project team comes back with an update.

Everyone in that room would tell you the programme is well governed. They are not wrong about the room. The pack is good. The attendance is good. The decisions are being made somewhere else.

This is what happens when decisions arrive as updates. The committee has the authority. The pack has the information. But nothing on the table says: here is the call, here are the options, here is who owns it, here is the date it has to be made by. So it gets noted, and it goes back down, and eventually somebody at a desk makes it because a case is in front of them and it cannot wait.

The cost is not that the wrong call gets made. It is that the right one gets made a thousand times, by different people, with no record that it was ever made at all.

A steering committee is not there to be informed. Being informed is what the pack is for. It is there to make the calls nobody below it is allowed to make.

Pull up your last three packs. Count the decisions. Not the updates. Not the risks noted. Decisions, with an owner and a date.

How many did you find?