™Plain Governance
Plain Governance is an approach to designing, explaining, and assessing the arrangements for the exercise of power within a group, organisation, or society. It helps people make explicit what these arrangements provide for, examine how they work, and give reasons for their design and use.
This website sets out the approach and its framework of principles, concepts, and models. It provides guidance and tools for examining governance arrangements, supporting good decisions, and writing or reviewing policies.
This framework is for anyone interested in understanding or improving governance.
Eight sections
The framework
Read the sections in order
or select a topic.
The approach
Understand the purpose and method of Plain Governance.
Principles
Frame governance questions and explain the grounds for judgement.
Key concepts
Use simple models to describe roles, actions, and relationships, with sentence patterns that make their elements explicit.
Connections
Examine how governance roles, powers, and relationships work together.
Evaluating the effectiveness of arrangements
Examine arrangements in use and the ways their application can fail.
Making good decisions
Identify the qualities sought in decisions and the arrangements that support them.
Writing policies
Clarify what a policy establishes, records, or explains, and what each provision does.
Connecting with practice
How Plain Governance connects with professional approaches and terms.
Apply
Examine an arrangement
Use a diagram, table, or set of statements to describe a role, what is assigned to it, its relationships with other roles, and the instruments that establish these arrangements.
Establish an ethical use of AI committee | Appoint a whistleblower officer | Review a remuneration committee chair’s responsibilities
Evaluate effectiveness
Use the seven-stage model to examine how an arrangement is applied, then consider the results against its purpose.
Review terms of reference | Examine how a decision was made | Assess how an escalation procedure was applied
Design decision-making arrangements
Examine or design the governance arrangements for a type of decision or a particular decision. Choose the qualities sought, consider possible arrangements, and specify how they will support them.
Set procurement approval limits | Establish an investment approval process | Define which matters require a board decision
Write policies
Write or revise policy content. You can also describe who develops, approves, implements, and reviews the policy.
Draft a conflicts of interest policy | Review a whistleblowing policy | Clarify an AI use policy
Prepare a policy review paper
Prepare a policy review paper for a board or committee. Complete the relevant sections, preview the paper, and print or save it as a PDF.