Unf*cking Your CX #24: Governance Is the Graveyard of Great CX Strategy Execution

Corporate Governance Is Killing Innovation

Corporate governance is a slow death march for bold ideas.

Here’s how it works: Endless committees. PowerPoint presentations. Back-to-back meetings where no one actually decides anything. If your CX strategy feels stuck, slow, or uninspired, it’s because governance isn’t enabling you—it’s sabotaging you.

The hard truth? Governance isn’t protecting your brand. It’s killing it.

Your customers don’t care how many approvals you need to launch a new feature. They care about speed, innovation, and seamless experiences. Essentially, you must keep their pace or they churn. If your governance model slows that down, it’s time to burn it to the ground and rebuild it as something that actually works.

Why Corporate Governance Is Failing CX

Too many brands treat governance like a status symbol—a bloated, bureaucratic process designed to look important. But let’s call it what it is: a bottleneck.

Here’s what’s really going wrong:

1. Governance Lives Outside Strategy Governance operates in a vacuum. The people making decisions aren’t the ones executing them, creating a massive disconnect between strategy and action.
2. Bloated with Approvals and Committees Governance isn’t about moving fast; it’s about proving control. More meetings, more approvals, more delays. The result? Competitors delivering while you debate.
3. Prioritizes Control Over Customer Needs Governance often focuses on minimizing risk or maintaining internal alignment instead of driving outcomes for your customers. That’s why your CX feels safe—but also forgettable.

Governance isn’t just failing CX; it’s actively working against it.

The Hidden Costs of Broken Governance

Governance that stifles strategy doesn’t just slow you down—it costs you everything that makes your brand competitive:

• Your Speed to Market While you’re stuck in approval hell, your competitors are launching new features, testing ideas, and capturing market share.
• Customer Loyalty Customers don’t wait for you to “align” internally. If your CX doesn’t evolve with their needs, they’ll leave—and they won’t come back.
• Team Morale Nothing kills motivation faster than bureaucracy. When teams are buried in unnecessary governance processes, frustration sets in, and momentum dies.

Your governance model isn’t just a bottleneck—it’s a business risk.

Reimagining Governance as CX Strategy’s Enabler

Governance doesn’t have to be a bottleneck. It can be a powerful tool to accelerate your strategy—if you stop treating it like an oversight mechanism and start embedding it into your CX process. Here’s how:

1. Embed Governance Into Strategy Pods Governance doesn’t belong in boardrooms. It belongs in the trenches. Create multidisciplinary journey strategy pods where governance is built into the process—not hovering above it.
2. Align Governance with Business Strategy Governance isn’t a separate process—it is your strategy. Make governance directly accountable to business goals and remove anything that doesn’t serve the customer experience.
3. Make Governance About Action, Not Control Kill the committees. Replace endless meetings with decision-first frameworks that prioritize speed, outcomes, and impact.

Governance should empower your CX strategy to move faster, adapt quicker, and innovate bolder.

3 Player Tips to "Unf*ck It" -> Governance

1. Put Governance in the Trenches Governance shouldn’t hover above your team—it should work within it. Embed governance into agile strategy pods where decisions are made by the people closest to the work.
2. Focus on Outcomes, Not Updates Stop wasting time on endless check-ins and alignment meetings. Streamline governance to focus on measurable outcomes that impact your customers and your bottom line.
3. Demand Accountability If your governance model isn’t directly tied to achieving business goals, it’s useless. Tie governance to KPIs like customer retention, speed to market, and revenue growth.

2 Frameworks to Reimagine Governance

Framework 1: The Governance Pod Model

Kill the endless meetings and approvals. Replace them with multidisciplinary pods designed to move fast and deliver results:

• Who’s in the Pod? CX champions, data experts, and operational leaders.
• What’s Their Power? Real-time decision authority—no external approvals needed.
• What’s Their Goal? Achieve customer-centric outcomes, fast.

Framework 2: The Decision-First Model

Streamline governance by focusing on decisions, not processes:

1. Map the Barriers: Identify approval loops and redundant steps that slow progress.
2. Simplify Touchpoints: Eliminate any governance layer that doesn’t add direct value to strategy execution.
3. Prioritize Decisions: Build a governance model that moves strategy forward instead of debating it to death.

Thought-Provoking Question

“Is your governance model enabling strategy—or suffocating it?”

Burn the Bottleneck, Build the Strategy

Corporate governance doesn’t have to be where ideas go to die. It can be where great strategies are born—if you’re willing to kill the old model and build one that works.

Governance isn’t about control—it’s about clarity. It’s not about alignment—it’s about action. And it’s not about oversight—it’s about outcomes.

Stop waiting for approvals. Stop building for safety. Start governing for speed, impact, and innovation. It’s time to unf*ck your governance and give your CX strategy the freedom to thrive.

Let’s make it happen. 💥