What growth-phase research suggests
Larry E. Greiner’s research on organisational growth frames crisis as functionally built into the growth process itself — each phase of growth ends in a crisis precisely because the practices that worked at the previous scale are relied upon past the point where they remain adequate. This has an uncomfortable implication for proactive review: if crisis is the mechanism by which organisations typically discover that a governance structure has outgrown its usefulness, then organisations may have limited practical experience of discovering the same thing proactively, because the growth process itself has historically taught them to expect the crisis to be the signal.
What incentive research suggests
Steven Kerr’s research on organisations rewarding one behaviour while hoping for another offers a second angle. Proactive governance review — time spent examining a structure that is not currently visibly failing — rarely has a clear, immediate reward attached to it, compared with work that addresses a visible, pressing problem. If organisational attention reliably follows what is measured and rewarded, as Kerr’s research suggests, then proactive review is structurally disadvantaged relative to reactive response, because reactive response to an actual crisis is far more visibly rewarded — recognised, resourced, prioritised — than the comparatively invisible work of confirming that a structure not yet in crisis remains sound. Kerr’s own documented examples of this divergence — interviewers rewarded for speed rather than placement quality, investigators rewarded for case volume rather than case difficulty — describe organisations that got exactly what they measured, at the expense of what they actually wanted. Governance review timing follows the same logic: an organisation that measures and rewards visible crisis response, without any comparable recognition for time spent on review that finds nothing wrong, should expect proactive review to lose out in the competition for leadership attention, regardless of how much anyone genuinely values it in principle.
What psychological-safety research suggests
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety adds a third angle specific to how a proactive review would actually have to begin: someone would need to raise the possibility that a currently functioning governance structure has a latent flaw, before any evidence of failure exists to justify the concern. Edmondson’s finding that psychological safety, rather than general team confidence, predicts whether teams surface this kind of tentative, unproven concern suggests that proactive review is disproportionately unlikely in lower-safety environments — precisely because it requires someone to raise a concern that cannot yet point to a concrete failure as evidence. This is a meaningfully harder kind of statement to make than flagging an incident that has already occurred, because it invites a colleague to question, in advance and without proof, a structure that has been working well enough that nobody else has raised any concern about it.
Where these threads agree
All three threads converge on the same underlying conclusion: proactive governance review is disadvantaged not by any single cause but by several reinforcing ones. Growth-phase research suggests organisations are conditioned to expect crisis as the discovery mechanism. Incentive research suggests proactive review is structurally under-rewarded relative to reactive response. Psychological-safety research suggests even raising the possibility of a latent flaw requires a degree of interpersonal risk that many teams are reluctant to take. None of the three, on its own, fully explains the pattern — together, they describe a structure in which reactive governance review is close to the default outcome.
Where they diverge
The three threads suggest different points of leverage for changing the pattern. Greiner’s research points toward building an expectation of periodic review into how growth itself is managed, rather than treating review as separate from growth. Kerr’s research points toward the reward structure — proactive review would need some form of recognition or resourcing to compete with the visibility of reactive crisis response. Edmondson’s research points toward the interpersonal environment — a team with genuinely high psychological safety may conduct proactive review simply because raising a tentative concern carries less personal risk there, independent of any change to incentives or expectations.
What remains unresolved
None of these three bodies of research was designed to test governance review timing directly, and the connections drawn here are reasonable extensions rather than direct findings. What the evidence supports, taken together, is that the tendency toward reactive rather than proactive governance review is a genuinely multi-causal pattern, which likely means no single intervention — better incentives alone, or more safety alone — is sufficient on its own to shift it.
It is also worth being honest about what this convergence does not establish: it does not tell an organisation how much proactive review is enough, nor does it offer a way to distinguish, in advance, between a structure that genuinely needs review and one that does not — the same three reinforcing barriers apply regardless of whether the underlying concern turns out to be justified. An organisation that succeeds in overcoming all three barriers still faces the ordinary difficulty of judging which parts of its governance structure most warrant scrutiny, a question this body of research does not directly answer.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- What would prompt a review of governance in this organisation if no incident had occurred — and when was one last held for that reason alone?
- Is time spent examining a structure that is working well enough recognised in any way, or does attention go to whatever is visibly pressing?
- Who could raise a concern about a working structure, before any evidence of failure, without it being heard as an accusation?
More on this topic: Governance.
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