Good governance should help teams make better content decisions

A framework for deciding when governance adds value, and when it doesn't.

Content teams want to do good work. They want to understand what people need, reduce risk and deliver content that works.

Compromising their approach can feel like compromising the outcome. Every step exists to improve quality, reduce risk and increase the chances of success. Cutting a step feels like the result will likely be worse, and will ultimately reflect badly on them.

At the same time, organisations want teams to deliver faster. Budgets are tighter. AI is raising expectations about how quickly content can be produced. 

For heads of content and heads of design, this is a balancing act. They want to support their teams to do good work and use their skills well, while helping the organisation deliver at pace with limited time and resources.

Design the minimum governance first

In a recent workshop with a client, we explored this tension by designing a minimum governance approach: the checks every piece of content should pass through, and a clear way to decide when doing more is worth the time and effort.

I asked the team:”If your content workflow was on fire, which steps would you save?”

This shifted the conversation from "What ought we do?" to "What actually adds value?" 

Content designers know what good practice looks like. The harder skill is knowing when the extra effort changes the outcome. Several rounds of user research might be essential before redesigning a service used by thousands of people. But the same activity might add very little to a small update on a page that's already performing well, or a complex piece of work reaching very few specialists.

The steps that survived were the ones that reduced risk or protected a minimum standard: user needs, style reviews, accessibility and fact-checks. 

Doing this exercise helped the team articulate the trade-offs involved in keeping or removing steps, and identify when additional activities could be justified for particular requests.

A trap that some content teams fall into is spending more time defending and following best practice, rather than deciding when best practice is actually necessary and adds concrete value.

Governance supports judgement 

Governance has a stuffy reputation: bureaucracy, process for process's sake and endless approval loops. 

Done well, governance supports something much more useful. It gives teams a shared way of deciding what work deserves more effort, what can move faster, and why.

Some work deserves the full treatment. Some doesn’t. But, without a clear, agreed way of making these calls, decisions end up resting on personal preference, opinion or whim. Often shaped by whoever is most senior, loudest or stubborn.

Minimum governance doesn't replace judgement. Instead, it should give teams a consistent way of surfacing and asking questions like:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• What value will this create?
• What happens if we do nothing?
• What risk are we accepting?
• Is the effort proportionate to the outcome?

Content work can be a black box. Stakeholders often can't see what a team is doing or what they'll get from it. Asking these questions earlier makes the work easier to understand. It also helps teams explain trade-offs, make risk visible and build the case for spending more time where it matters.

Better decisions together

For content practitioners, there's no shame in not doing everything you feel you ought to in the eyes of the content design gods, or some invisible standard.

Being explicit about what you're not doing, why, and what risk that carries is a sign of maturity. It also takes the weight off individual designers by moving those decisions into the open. They become team and organisational decisions, not personal ones.

A shared approach gives teams permission to reduce effort where the value is low. It also gives them stronger ground to insist on more rigour when the likely impact or risk justifies it.

Content teams shouldn't just deliver content. They should help their organisations make better content decisions by explaining the value and trade-offs of adding or skipping activities, and how those decisions affect cost, productivity and risk. 

So, start by agreeing the minimum governance every piece of content should pass through. After that, everything else becomes a conversation about proportionality: where additional effort creates enough value to justify the time, cost and risk.

That's a much healthier conversation for content teams, leaders and stakeholders to have and is where governance becomes less about process and rules, and more about making better decisions together.

How CDL can help

CDL runs workshops to help teams step back from day-to-day delivery and solve problems around content strategy, governance and ways of working.

If your team needs a clearer, more proportionate way to make content decisions, book a discovery call with us.