Part 1 showed the map. Nine predictable stages of governance failure. The same pattern, the same script, the same ending. Chaos plus theater.

Most organizations are at Stage 2 right now. They know there’s AI chaos. Leadership is demanding answers. Someone’s been tasked with “figuring out AI governance.”

The natural response is to start building: write policies, create review processes, stand up a governance body. That response leads straight into the spiral.

Here’s what actually needs to happen instead.

The industry wants you to believe AI governance is a process problem. Better frameworks, clearer policies, stronger enforcement. It’s not. It’s an organizational health problem with governance-specific requirements layered on top. Skip either layer and you end up in the spiral.

The Foundation You Already Need

Before we talk about governance, we need to talk about organizational health.

I covered this in Decide or Drown Part 4: the preconditions that make any operational framework work. Servant leadership. Psychological safety. Customer obsession as actual priority. Willingness to measure honestly.

If those don’t exist in your organization, stop here. No governance framework survives contact with an organization that punishes honesty, rewards politics over outcomes, or measures compliance instead of results. Fix the foundation first, or accept that you’re performing governance rather than building it.

If those preconditions exist, even imperfectly, governance has something to build on. Here’s what the governing body itself needs.

Governance Requirement 1: Define What “Good” Means

I’ve watched leadership mandate AI governance because the magazine in the first-class seat pocket told them they needed it. No definition of what success looks like. No criteria for knowing if it’s working. Just “we need AI governance” with the same conviction and the same emptiness as “we need to be data-driven” and “we need digital transformation.”

Without defining “good,” you can never reach it.

Before you can govern AI, you need to articulate what success looks like. Not compliance. Not process. Outcomes.

What customer problems are we solving with AI? What business metrics improve if we do this right? What breaks if we do this wrong? How will we know the difference?

Most organizations skip this step. They start writing policies about acceptable use, data handling, security controls. All of that matters. None of it matters if you haven’t defined what you’re enabling.

The question isn’t “what’s our AI governance policy?” It’s “what are we trying to accomplish with AI, and what would prevent us from accomplishing it?”

That shifts the frame. Governance stops being about restriction and starts being about enablement. You’re not asking “how do we prevent bad AI implementations?” You’re asking “how do we make good AI implementations easier than bad ones?”

That’s illusion of choice applied to AI governance. You don’t tell teams “no.” You curate the options so every choice leads to acceptable outcomes. The same principle that makes platform decisions work makes governance decisions work.

Governance without a destination is just traffic control. You slow everyone down without getting them anywhere better.

Governance Requirement 2: Establish Authority With Accountability

Early in my career, I watched an architecture review board headed by the CFO. The CFO sat as judge. The ARB members served as jury, making recommendations. The CFO overrode those recommendations constantly. The person who controlled the purse controlled the conversation. It didn’t matter what the technical experts recommended. Budget authority trumped architectural authority every time.

That org didn’t have governance. They had a ritual that made governance look like it existed while one person made every real decision.

You can’t enable patterns you don’t have authority to establish. You can’t make the golden path work if business pressure can override you at every turn. You can’t create coherence if teams can escalate their way around you.

Authority requires executive sponsorship that survives conflict. When a VP wants to bypass established patterns, does your executive sponsor back the governance body’s decision? Or do they override every time business pressure appears? If governance is being overridden constantly, you don’t have governance. You have advisory opinions that get ignored when inconvenient.

Authority requires explicit accountability for outcomes. If the governance body makes a decision that turns out wrong, who owns the consequences? Accountability works both ways. The governance body needs authority to make decisions. With that authority comes responsibility for whether those decisions were right.

Authority requires budget influence. If governance can’t affect how money gets spent, it’s advisory. Advisory becomes ignorable. Can the governance body shape investment toward platforms that fit the architecture? Can they ensure funding exists for the golden path to actually be golden? If the answer is “no, we just review and advise,” then governance is already positioned to fail.

You need a governance charter that leadership actually signs. Not a mission statement. A contract. Authority in exchange for accountability. This body has authority to make specific decisions. Accountability for outcomes rests with specific people. Executive sponsorship includes specific commitment to back decisions.

If leadership won’t sign that charter, governance has already failed. At least you know early, before you waste months building something that was never going to work.

Governance Requirement 3: Position as Enablement, Not Enforcement

I’ve lived this positioning failure. Governance showed up as a checkpoint, not a partner. Teams learned to route around me before I’d been there a month. The first impression was set: governance is what slows you down.

The positioning determines whether governance succeeds or becomes theater.

If the first interaction between governance and teams is “you can’t do that,” you’ve positioned governance as a blocker. Teams will route around you. If the first interaction is “here’s how we can help you do that safely,” you’ve positioned governance as a partner.

Pre-approved patterns teams can adopt without review. The golden path that’s genuinely easier than alternatives. Better documentation. Better support. Faster approval for adjacent decisions. Teams follow it because it’s the path of least resistance, not because someone’s forcing them.

Consulting before review. Governance embedded in the design phase, not added at the approval gate. The governance function shows up early, when teams are still figuring out their approach. You’re shaping the “yes” at the beginning, not saying “no” at the end.

Clear boundaries for what needs review versus what doesn’t. Inside these boundaries, teams have autonomy. Outside these boundaries, governance review is required. Make the boundaries clear enough that teams can self-assess. This prevents governance from becoming a bottleneck for low-risk decisions while ensuring high-risk decisions get appropriate scrutiny.

You don’t get a second chance at first impression. Position wrong and you’ll spend years fighting the perception that governance exists to slow things down.

Why Organizations Won’t Do This

The requirements aren’t complicated. Define success. Establish authority. Position as enablement.

Organizations don’t fail at governance because the requirements are hard to understand. They fail because building them exposes dysfunction that’s easier to leave buried.

Defining “good” forces leadership to agree on priorities. That means someone’s initiative gets deprioritized. Someone’s pet project doesn’t align with the stated strategy. Someone has to admit their business case was wishful thinking. Easier to skip definition and let everyone claim alignment.

Establishing authority threatens existing power structures. The governance body gets budget influence. That means someone else loses it. Executive sponsorship that survives conflict means executives risk their political capital. That VP who escalates around governance? They lose that escape hatch. Easier to create advisory governance that doesn’t threaten anyone.

Starting with enablement requires spending before you collect. Building golden paths costs money. Consulting during design takes architect time. Pre-approved patterns require governance to do work before teams ask for it. The payoff comes later. The cost is now. Easier to position governance as a review gate that doesn’t require upfront investment.

The Tooling Trap

This is why the tooling vendors are winning. They promise to automate governance without forcing any of these conversations.

AI will enforce your patterns! Except you never built organizational consensus around what the patterns should be. AI will flag violations! Except you never established authority to act on those violations. AI will speed up review! Except teams are routing around review entirely because you positioned it as a blocker.

The tooling amplifies your governance model. If the model is broken, the tooling accelerates the dysfunction. If the model is sound, the tooling helps. The requirements above determine which outcome you get.

Most organizations will buy the tooling, skip the requirements, automate the theater, and end up in the spiral anyway. Just with better dashboards showing the dysfunction.

The truth about AI governance tooling is the same truth about any automation: you can’t automate your way out of organizational dysfunction. You can only automate the dysfunction faster.

What Escape Actually Costs

I’ve lived this recovery.

At Children’s Mercy Hospital, I walked into a governance body that was doing things wrong. Forcing function that created internal team division. Teams routing around each other. Stages 3 through 5 playing out in real time.

My official role wasn’t to fix this. But the work that needed doing was bridge-building. Freeing teams to innovate. Establishing a framework that made sense instead of one that made enemies.

Did it require compromise to repair relationships? Yes. Did I personally need to fall on the sword for the sins of the past, for decisions I didn’t make and dysfunction I didn’t create? Of course.

But here’s what makes that bearable: when you’re valued, when you’re proven to be needed, the sword doesn’t cut as deep. And when teams that spent months subverting each other finally come together to create something neither could have built alone - I’d do it a hundred times again.

That’s what escaping the spiral actually looks like. Not a framework. Not a policy. A person willing to absorb the cost of repair, backed by leadership willing to let them do it.

The three requirements I listed aren’t abstract. They’re what made Children’s Mercy possible. We defined what good looked like for our context. Authority existed and survived conflict. Enablement positioning gave teams a reason to come back to the table instead of continuing to route around.

And here’s what nobody tells you about fixing governance: leaving is harder than staying would have been. When you’ve done the work, when you’ve absorbed the cost, when you’ve watched teams build together what they couldn’t build apart - walking away from that is its own kind of loss. I’ve written about recognizing improvable environments versus unsalvageable ones. Children’s Mercy was improvable. I proved it. That made leaving one of the hardest decisions I’ve made.

Most organizations won’t pay this cost. That’s their choice. But don’t tell yourself escape is impossible. It’s expensive. That’s different.

The spiral is comfortable because it’s familiar. Everyone’s doing it. The artifacts look like progress. The meetings feel like work. Escape requires admitting the spiral was never going to end differently, and choosing the harder path anyway.

The Choice

You’ve seen the map. You know what the spiral costs. You know what escape costs.

The organizational preconditions are table stakes. Without servant leadership, psychological safety, customer obsession, and honest measurement, nothing I’ve written here matters. Fix that first or accept theater.

If those exist, the governance requirements are buildable. Define what good means. Establish authority with accountability. Position as enablement from day one.

Most organizations won’t do this work. They’ll buy tooling instead. They’ll write policies instead. They’ll stand up review boards that become bottlenecks and then wonder why teams route around them.

The spiral is predictable. The escape is possible. The cost is real.

Choose.

This piece concludes the AI Governance series. For the diagnostic that shows where your organization is on the spiral, read Part 1: The AI Governance Trap. For the organizational health preconditions that must exist before governance can work, see Decide or Drown Part 4. For why architects stop doing the translation work that governance requires, read Architects Stop Translating. For recognizing improvable versus unsalvageable environments, the diagnostic is also in Decide or Drown Part 4.

Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash