There’s a word the field is wary of. Practitioners warn that if you mention it too early in collaborative initiatives — when people are doing the actual work of coordinating across difference — you can stifle the natural flow of dialogue and authentic relating, and choke out momentum.
Governance is a word so laden with control and dominance that it seems to be a contradiction to the flourishing of all life that we seek. In rooms where practitioners are doing the relationally complex, regenerative, network-weaving work of transforming systems, it can arrive heavy and stale.
That wariness is understandable. Governance, in its dominant institutional forms, has been precisely the thing our work is trying to get out from under — the rules and norms behind the concentration of power and wealth that is crippling our capacity to respond to the issues of our time.
And yet.
The word we’re avoiding is the word that most accurately names what we’re doing. If you cede the language, you cede the frame.
Governance is the how of navigating together toward shared purpose. It encompasses a constellation of practices — leadership, strategy, narrative, structure, facilitation — all the ways groups of people make and remake their own direction.
When a group practices being present and embodied in meetings to ground their discussions, that’s governance. When a coalition maps the assets in a community and reaches out beyond the usual suspects for participation, that’s governance. When co-founders make dozens of small decisions about what gets funded and what is let go, that’s governance — even if their criteria are not yet written down and “approved.” When we facilitate mapping exercises to help people in the room recognize the complexity of issues and diverse points of view, we are governing toward insight and collective sense-making.
We’ve been doing it all along. We’ve just been calling it other things — collaboration, facilitation, co-creation, emergent strategy, “just enough structure” — because the word itself felt contaminated.
If practitioners in regenerative and systems change work stop using the word, then the only people left defining and practicing governance are the institutions already doing it badly. The word, and everything it represents — how resources flow, how decisions get made, who counts — gets left in the hands of the paradigm we are trying to move beyond.
In Circle Forward, we say: governance gives form to the culture’s power relationships and norms. Governance becomes the rules for who makes the rules and how — both explicitly and implicitly. The field’s quiet retreat from the word is also a retreat from the conversation about power, and this is precisely the conversation this work requires.
Because power gives form to governance too. When we recognize that shared power is a shared value, that trust is a currency in networks, and we design our first gatherings around building relationships — we’re locating governance in a new paradigm.
And here’s the invitation: reclaiming the word is itself a structural move, not a semantic preference. When we name what we’re doing as governance — the way we are navigating together — we can remake it. As we hold it accountable to the principles we already claim — equity, learning, power-with, living systems — it becomes a bridge to a new paradigm.
The question, then, is not whether to govern, but whether we can find patterns for governance that flows: that mimics nature, weaves feedback cycles for learning and iteration, evolves and adapts to what is emerging in real time, redistributes power rather than concentrating it, and is ultimately relational, like living systems themselves.
The alternative is to keep improvising around a word we’ve ceded to the institutions we’re trying to transform. That’s a gift to the old paradigm we don’t need to keep giving.
Governance That Flows is an inquiry into what governance could become when we let it transform too. Not the governance of boardrooms and bylaws. The governance of networks, of movements, of collaborative life. A living practice. A pattern, not a framework. Drawing on the traditions that have been teaching it all along.
This inquiry doesn’t ask you to love the word. It asks you to look at it. To notice where you’ve set it down, and what you’ve been using in its place. To consider whether the thing you’ve been calling something else might be precisely this
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Really appreciating this article Tracy. I will share it with my current client who is also struggling with the word "governance."
A beautiful invitation, Tracy, to revisit my relationship with the term governance. "Reclaiming the word is itself a structural move, not a semantic preference. When we name what we’re doing as governance — the way we are navigating together — we can remake it. As we hold it accountable to the principles we already claim — equity, learning, power-with, living systems — it becomes a bridge to a new paradigm." A bold and necessary move ~ thank you!