Governance, not templates

15 November 2025, Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl

There’s a particular moment when the board papers land with a weight that’s wildly disproportionate to the paper itself.  A kind of collective exhale follows, polite but unmistakably weary. We smile thinly at one another, as if to say >> If reporting is meant to make things clearer, why does it feel like we’re sinking?

I’ve seen that look in Stuttgart, in Penang, in Brussels, in Honiara. I’ve worn it myself. We all have. In this shift, the question of corporate reporting governance sits at the centre.

Lately, in Europe, a curious shift has begun. After years of thickening ESG templates and demands for disclosures so granular they could have been written by a cartographer, the tide is moving the other way. The Centre for European Policy Studies¹, in a tone both weary and firm, voiced and opinion that I tend to agree with. Reporting is not a paperwork problem, it’s a governance problem. And deep down, most of us already knew.

Because in my experience, whether in board masterminds, or in the corners of Pacific ministries, or in the fluorescent glow of a German corporate committee room, the system breaks in the same place every time. Not in the template… it breaks in the spine.

At a science institute I work with, we weren’t struggling with language. We were struggling with how decisions travelled, where they stopped, and whose hands they were empowered in in. At a German mulit-nat, we weren’t debating how to phrase Scope 3, we were trying to ensure that when the auditors asked how we knew our metrics, we had something sturdier than hope. And in the circular-materials innovation world iin Holland and Spain, I’ve worked with founders with hearts full of ambition and spreadsheets held together with tape. They wanted to report like global companies before their systems had learned how to walk.

The Pacific was different, and yet not different at all. In a public finance program last year, entire national systems strained under the demand to produce donor-friendly transparency, not because people lacked commitment, but because governance capacity had not been given the courtesy of time, training, or infrastructure. And still, I watched civil servants doing heroic work with a single flickering light and a laptop that as exhausted as they were.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we sit in glass-walled rooms with reports that look like novels and can sometimes mean too little.

• Sometimes the places with the least paper have the clearest truth.
• Sometimes the places with the most paper have the least.

So now Brussels says it will “simplify”, some of us hold a breath the way you laugh when your accountant tells you your finance filing has been “streamlined.” Simplification never really means what you think. And what it means now is something more interesting, and honestly, more honest… Europe’s reset is, at its core, a reset in corporate reporting governance, even if the policy language feels administrative.

The burden of proof is shifting back to us.

Fewer templates, yes but we need to hold the high(er) expectations.

Investors and regulators are not impressed by quantity, they want to know whether the system underneath the reporting is real, and how controls exist. Whether governance is something we do, not just something we write about. They no longer ask only what we report, they ask how we know. In my opinion, ‘reporting’ was never meant to be a theatrical performance it was meant to be the portrait of a system. And perhaps the portrait looks blurry because the system is. This is exactly where corporate reporting governance either stands firm or collapses under pressure.

When I talk with peers, in board circles, at roundtables, on late-night calls before approvals, the nodding is universal and we all feel it …. the future belongs to organisations that treat reporting as a structural act. We don’t need more pages, we need a backbone. Not more narrative, clearer decision rights. Not larger sustainability or innovation teams but better cross-functional coherence.

Governance, in the end, is the skeleton beneath the corporate skin. You notice it most when something breaks.

The organisations I’ve helped shape over the years, from global institutions to fragile ecosystems to ambitious ventures, all converge on one truth that when governance is strong, reporting is simply a by-product of a functioning organism. When governance is weak, reporting becomes a frantic performance held together by people’s goodwill (and caffeine).

And like all mirrors, its truth depends on the steadiness of the hand that holds it.

When I look across institutions, corporate reporting governance isn’t abstract — it shows up in how decisions are made, challenged, and communicated.

Footnote

¹ CEPS  the Centre for European Policy Studies  is a Brussels think tank analysing EU policy, governance, and regulation.