On the return of the operating committee

Across the organisations we measured last year, a pattern kept repeating: the ones deciding fastest were not the ones with the flattest structures or the most collaborative tools. They were the ones with an old-fashioned weekly operating forum — fixed membership, fixed agenda, real authority. The informal organisations were consultative everywhere and decisive nowhere; their decisions travelled socially, and social routes are slow.

The operating committee solves a problem the informal alternatives cannot: it gives decisions an address. When a decision class has a forum, an owner and a slot in the week, it waits days. When it has a channel, a thread and goodwill, it waits weeks — our latency data prices the difference at nine working weeks a year in the median organisation.

The committee coming back is not the one that left. The versions we see working are smaller — five to seven members — and review outcomes against a baseline rather than activity against a plan. They exist to decide, not to be informed; anything that is information travels in writing beforehand.

Boards should notice, because the shift changes what good governance looks like one level down. The question worth asking your executive team is not whether it collaborates well. It is whether every recurring decision in the business knows where it will be decided, by whom, and by when. Where that answer is vague, the operating committee — the real one — is the repair.