The finding
Leadership teams rarely decide, in a single deliberate moment, to postpone governance work. More often, governance improvements sit on a list of acknowledged priorities that never quite reaches the top, while other, more urgent-feeling work continues to take precedence — until an incident forces the issue.
Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard Business School on psychological safety in work teams offers a partial explanation for why this pattern is so durable. Studying 51 manufacturing work teams, Edmondson found that psychological safety — the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, including raising concerns or admitting uncertainty — predicted learning behaviour within a team, while a team’s general confidence in its own capability did not, once psychological safety was accounted for. Her own summary of the finding is direct: team psychological safety is associated with learning behaviour, while team efficacy is not, once psychological safety is controlled for.
Applied to governance specifically, this suggests that the concern most likely to justify prioritising governance work earlier — “the way we currently make this kind of decision has a real gap in it” — is exactly the kind of concern that requires psychological safety to raise, particularly when it implicitly questions how senior leadership has been operating. In a leadership team without high psychological safety, that concern is more likely to go unspoken, which means the case for acting earlier never gets made with the force it deserves.
How this shows up in practice
A common shape for this pattern is a leadership team in which someone privately holds a concern about a governance gap — an area where decision authority is unclear, where a control does not really control anything — but does not raise it forcefully, because doing so would mean pointing out a flaw in how senior colleagues have been operating, possibly for years. The concern surfaces eventually, but usually only after an incident makes it undeniable, at which point the organisation is responding to a crisis rather than making a considered improvement on its own timeline.
This is different from leadership simply failing to notice the gap. In many cases documented in organisational research, the gap was known, at least to someone, well before it became a crisis. What was missing was not awareness but a safe enough environment for that awareness to be voiced with the seriousness it warranted.
Why it happens
Beyond psychological safety specifically, governance work competes poorly against other priorities for a structural reason: its benefits are largely about avoided cost — the crisis that does not happen — which is inherently harder to make a compelling case for than an initiative with a visible, positive return. A leadership team choosing where to spend limited attention will generally find it easier to justify investing in something with a measurable upside than in strengthening a structure whose success is defined by nothing going wrong.
Edmondson’s research adds a further layer to this: even when someone on the team does recognise the governance gap, raising it requires a kind of interpersonal risk that a low-safety environment actively discourages, which means the case for prioritising it may simply never be made as persuasively as it could be, regardless of how clearly any individual sees the problem.
Where it varies
Founder-led organisations, where a single individual’s judgement has historically substituted for formal governance, often show a particularly acute version of this pattern, because raising a governance gap can feel close to questioning the founder’s own way of operating — a especially high-stakes version of the interpersonal risk Edmondson’s research describes. Organisations with more distributed leadership, or with board members who are structurally somewhat independent of day-to-day operations, tend to have at least one channel less exposed to this dynamic, though the underlying pattern still applies within any given team.
A common misconception worth addressing directly is that delay reflects a leadership team’s priorities being wrong — that governance simply matters less to them than other work. Edmondson’s research points to a different mechanism: the priority ranking itself may be sound, but the information needed to act on a genuine governance concern is not reliably reaching the people who set priorities, because raising it costs the person who notices it something real. A leadership team can therefore be entirely sincere in valuing governance highly in the abstract, while still failing to prioritise a specific, known gap, simply because nobody with direct knowledge of it felt safe enough to make the case with appropriate urgency.
The consequence of this dynamic compounds over time in a specific way: each cycle in which a known concern goes unraised without visible consequence reinforces, for the person holding it, that raising it was correctly judged not worth the risk — which makes the same concern, or the next one like it, less likely to be raised the following time. Left unaddressed, this can produce a leadership team that is structurally worse at surfacing exactly the kind of concern most likely to prevent a governance crisis, even as its members individually become more experienced and more capable in every other respect.
For how this pattern presents in other kinds of organisation, see other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- How safe would any individual on the leadership team feel raising a concern that implicitly criticises how a senior colleague — or the team as a whole — has been operating?
- Has governance work ever been prioritised on its own timeline, rather than in response to an incident that has already occurred?
More on this topic: Governance.
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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