Chapter 12: Good Timing: The Digital Age

GOVERNANCE PUTS IDEAS IN ACTION. What ideas and how fast were questions in our 5-year project and a decade of observations scanning a landscape of decision-making. The basic conclusion was that it is time to treat governance as a separate discipline, overlapping skills of management but with a distinguishing expertise in strategic-oversight. This conclusion becomes more evident in a time of ubiquitous information, and misinformation, to identify patterns and gaps to bridge for those new to the discipline from diverse vocations or cultures, and to tie together a few ideas from different component disciplines. Many of the gaps were deficits in legal and governance literacy that we tried to reconcile as a baseline for our work, summarized in Appendix A. It is a good time to look at the governance landscape, alive for questions and updates in a digital age of changing information. This concluding chapter is an indication of examples in our scans of the breadth and depth of influences on governance.