When naming becomes strategic

24 November 2025, Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl

Sometimes governance is talked about in the abstract, like transparency, accountability and stewardship, words that sound noble but not always explain why one organisation moves with coherence while another stumbles despite having the same committees, the same charters, the same intentions. I think the real value becomes visible only when you look at what happens inside the machinery. When a role or committee is named honestly, the organisation knows where to place work. When it is named aspirationally or vaguely, the organisation leaks time, attention and authority in dozens of invisible ways. That leakage accumulates, quarter after quarter, until performance begins to warp.

Consider the organisations I’ve worked with this year. When a science institute corrected the gap between what the audit and risk committee “should” be doing and what it was actually positioned to do, the benefit wasn’t cosmetic. It reduced escalation delay (and we needed that this year!). That clarity frees hours, reduces anxiety, and lowers organisational drag, which are all things that don’t show up in a charter, but absolutely show up in execution. When a newly invested company reframed their so-called “partnership pipeline,” it didn’t simply tidy the language, it accelerated cash conversations, sharpened investor targeting, and reduced churn in feasibility cycles. Naming created precision, and their precision created speed (and focus).

Honestly, I think is how value is created in organisational governance, not through grand declarations but through a structural honesty that removes friction. When committees carry names that match their function, executives stop preparing material for the wrong forums. Boards stop repeating the same conversations across multiple tables. Risks land in the right place early enough to actually influence behaviour. Strategy discussions stop being retrospective commentary and become genuinely generative. And perhaps most importantly, people’s time stops being squandered on work that belongs elsewhere. In a complex organisation, the cost of that misplacement is enormous, not only in hours, but in trust, momentum and credibility.

Accurate naming also strengthens relational power. When a “Strategy Committee” is actually involved in shaping strategy, executives feel supported rather than inspected. When a “Risk Committee” is genuinely learning from risk rather than merely receiving it, the culture shifts from compliance to preparedness. This isn’t theory; it’s what I’ve seen repeatedly in public and private finance this year, once the language reflects the true work, the partners move more easily. it feels like coalitions form more honestly and expectations align. People stop stepping on each other’s toes because they finally understand their place.

Organisations do not fail because the people are wrong. They fail because the structures are imprecise. And as I just send off my latest update about governance precision to a series of major funders, and as pressures intensify , faster disclosure cycles, tighter funding, more complex risk landscapes I find that imprecision becomes expensive. It eats decision-making capacity and it breeds executive fatigue. It slows the very outcomes boards I work on and with, claim to care about.

So the value is this, when you correct the names, you correct the work. When you correct the work, you correct the flow of power, the flow of information, and the flow of decisions. That is not semantics, that is performance and this fuels resilience. In my experience, it is the difference between a board that reacts and a board that governs.