Transforming Fiduciary Decision-Making to Reduce Governance Risk

One of the most overlooked strategies to address global challenges is reducing the sources of governance risk in settings that are most responsible for driving the most intractable threats to humanity.

Virtually every global threat can be traced back to significant failures of fiduciary decision-making in identifiable governance settings, particularly in public and corporate contexts. Our focus is therefore on finding strategies and developing tools that enhance fiduciary decision-making processes, especially in legal, political and economic contexts, where the greatest risks to humanity are to be found.

By developing innovative approaches to governance that rebalance the complex forces acting upon key decision-makers, we can unlock new solutions to enhance human well-being and safeguard our shared future.

In a Nutshell

The future of humanity is threatened by an unprecedented range of cascading risks, from state failure and armed conflict to climate change and loss of biodiversity.

Degraded societal and planetary systems reduce humanity’s capacity to solve urgent global problems.

All these risks are the product of human decision-making and so in theory, all can be solved by human decision-making.

The question is therefore whether humanity can achieve sufficient unity of purpose and acquire much-needed decision-making tools to make the right choices in time.

The Challenge

Our Approach

Impact

We address decision-making through training programmes that combine ethics, fiduciary responsibility and procedural fairness. 

These programmes promote decision-making that is structured, accountable, evidence-based, ethical, inclusive and aligned with policies that protect the long term public interest.

This approach provides a powerful framework to understand and challenge forms of governance risk, establishing a gold standard and directing a spotlight on the negative forces acting upon decision-makers that produce poor outcomes.

Because fiduciary decision-making is so pervasive and is so instrumental in directing action, modest generic improvements in decision-making practices can have disproportionately beneficial effects.

We draw on experiences in the field that have demonstrated dramatic short and long term impacts.

  • Better administration, allocation of resources and service delivery

  • Improved policy formation

  • Balanced and forward thinking economic development

  • Fairness and justice in the workplace

  • Reduced uncertainty and conflict

  • Increased motivation, morale and productivity

  • Shrinking opportunities for corruption

  • Greater progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals

  • Humane and sustainably productive societies

What is meant by

    • Armed conflict and displacement of populations

    • Climate change

    • Poor pandemic responses

    • State capture and State failure

    • Economic policies that ratchet up the divide between rich and poor

    • First nuclear weapon use, intentional, accidental or false flag

    • Cycles of disinformation causing political polarisation

    • Artificial intelligence indifferent to human values

    • High level of dependence on vulnerable infrastructures

    • Cascading and interactive effects of multiple risks

    • State capture through the use of force and intimidation of citizens

    • Regulatory capture through lobbying and political donations

    • Kleptocracy and corrupt practices

    • Destruction or incremental erosion of protective institutions (see below)

    • Deception as a tool of governance

    • Deliberate under-resourcing of public institutions to weaken them

    • Inefficient cost externalisation through short-termism and the lateral transfer to citizens of costs, liabilities, risks and burdens

    • Political parties that are internally unaccountable and undemocratic

    • Wealth transfer and concentration passed off as wealth creation in highly extractive economies

    • Abuse of monopoly positions

    Such risks are products of conflicts of interest and other perverse incentives.

  • These institutions distribute responsibilities and govern the exercise of power through established mechanisms tested and refined over time. These include:

    • Separation of powers

    • The rule of law

    • Human rights and correlative obligations of duty-bearers

    • Mechanisms for citizens to choose those who represent them and to be included in policy-making

    • Independent media capable of scrutinising and disseminating news and informed commentary on public affairs

    • Learning and research ecosystems that use coherent, non-politicised processes to acquire, validate, curate and share knowledge.