The Crisis of Governance and the End of Certainty

For our second episode, we've turned our focus onto the governance of big projects; the set of rules that we use to help us decide which strategy to adopt in the first place and then, having adopted it, that frame how we should behave collaboratively to deliver it.

Terry Cooke-Davies opens with a challenge around the 'crisis of governance', the seeds of which he can trace back to enlightenment thinking. Our expert panel, David Hancock (Cabinet Office) , Liz Pattison (Lexica) and Greg Krawczyk (APM Governance SiG), then offer their own take on the issues, encouraged and facilitated by our podcast hosts, Donnie MacNicol and Jonathan Norman.

Fittingly for such a BIG subject, our conversation is very wide ranging, taking in everything from the problems created by:

• addressing leadership and management as two discrete and separate elements rather than as two sides of the same coin; 
• the persistence that we can bring certainty to delivery, despite all the evidence to the contrary
• a failure to adopt delivery models that are appropriate for the type of project we are engaged with

To the possible solutions:

• building Bayesian reasoning into our governance processes
• honestly recognising and accommodating the range of possible costs and time 
• adopting an approach to decision-making that at least attempts at a broad consensus
• recognising that this is not simply a problem of governance and that the solution needs to be far broader and more imaginative than simply 'tightening the rules'