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, with fixed membership, a fixed agenda and real authority. The informal organisations were consultative everywhere and decisive nowhere, because their decisions travelled socially, and a decision travelling socially moves at the speed of the least available person on its route.

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, and our latency data prices that difference at nine working weeks a year in the median organisation. We cannot tell you from this data whether the forum produces the speed or whether decisive firms simply build forums, and the honest position is that we have only watched the two travel together.

The committee coming back is not the one that left. The versions we see working are smaller, at five to seven members, and they review outcomes against a baseline rather than activity against a plan. They exist to decide. Anything that is only information travels in writing beforehand, and that is the discipline that fails first, because a forum which starts reading in the room turns back into a status meeting.

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. Ask instead whether every recurring decision in the business knows where it will be decided, by whom and by when, and whether anyone in the building could produce that list without a week of asking around. Where that answer is vague, the repair is an operating committee, designed and run rather than remembered fondly.