Boards frequently have well-drafted charters and delegation frameworks that describe an organisation nobody recognises in practice.
The test of a governance framework is whether a decision taken under time pressure can be traced afterwards to an authorised person acting within a defined mandate.
We look for three signals: whether delegations match actual decision-making, whether committee reporting reaches the board in a usable form, and whether exceptions are recorded rather than absorbed.
Improving governance is usually a matter of subtraction — removing ambiguity and duplicated authority — rather than adding further policy.