Answer extracted from the Beyond The Plan podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How do poor governance experiences carry forward across organizations?
Negative governance experiences are transferable across time and organizations—when people move to a new organization years after a poor experience, they carry that baggage with them. En masse, these bad experiences create a self-fulfilling prophecy around governance, embedding organizational reputations so deeply in culture that they persist regardless of what executives actually say or do.
How negative experiences become organizational identity
The damage doesn't reset when someone changes roles or companies. A person who experienced poor governance at one organization brings those scars forward, already skeptical and defensive before they even begin. Organizations develop reputations around governance that stick like mud, not because they lack good intentions, but because reputation is built on visible, lived behavior—not on aspirational messaging.
This is where the gap between language and action becomes critical. Executives can declare that governance has improved, that systems have changed, and that decision-making is now fit for purpose. But as Isabel Gray-Garraway discusses in the episode, the real signal is what people actually experience when they work through those governance structures day to day.
Culture embeds past failures into future projects
Once a governance failure happens—especially one visible across an entire organization or sector—that perception becomes embedded in organizational culture. New projects inherit that skepticism. Team members approach governance processes already expecting them to fail or obstruct, making it harder to rebuild trust even when structures genuinely improve.
The Australian government's RoboDebt program offers a stark example of how this ripples forward. Six years after the program ended in 2019, the reputational damage from that governance failure—which cost close to $2 billion in refunds, compensation, and class action settlements—continues to influence how agencies approach new initiatives. A Royal Commission was held in 2023 specifically to examine what went wrong, cementing the memory of the failure in institutional culture.
"Governance is the structure and systems that ensure the right people make the right decisions at the right time about project and delivery risk."
Isabel Gray-Garraway — Director of ICT Corporate Portfolio at Fire and Rescue NSW. With 25 years of project delivery experience spanning defence, government, and public-private hybrid organisations, Gray-Garraway spent 17 years in government roles where she learned the relationship between risk, accountability, and governance. She led a 100-person team managing a $200 million rolling program at Transport for New South Wales focused on road safety and regulation transformation, and has worked extensively in audit, risk, security, architecture, and enterprise governance across multiple sectors.
Understanding this mechanism is essential: if you want to break the cycle of poor governance perception, you can't do it with statements or policies alone. You have to change the actual lived experience of governance. This is why this conversation goes deep into how organizations can rebuild trust through concrete governance structures rather than just fixing messaging.
Key takeaways
- Negative governance experiences travel with people across organizations and years, shaping how they approach new roles and projects.
- Organizational reputations around governance are built on lived experience and behavior, not on what leaders say or policy documents claim.
- Poor governance creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where teams approach processes with defensiveness and skepticism, making recovery harder.
- Reputational damage from governance failures persists for years (as seen with RoboDebt, which still affects Australian public sector credibility six years after completion).
See also
Why does good governance often have a poor reputation while bad governance is highly memorable?
Good governance is invisible because it works seamlessly—processes flow together, decisions are made, project teams feel supported, and it becomes business as usual. Bad governance, by contrast, creates friction, delays, and frustration that people remember vividly and carry with them.
What financial and reputational consequences has the Australian government faced as a result of RoboDebt's governance failures?
The Australian government spent close to $2 billion on refunds, repayments, reimbursements, and compensation, including class action payments. A Royal Commission was held in 2023 to investigate, and reputational damage from the 2015–2019 program continues to persist years later.
How does the RoboDebt program exemplify governance failure in public sector delivery?
RoboDebt (2015–2019) was a governance failure, not a technology or data failure. It lacked a single accountable executive decision maker, with multiple agencies and systems involved but no clear governance structure to ensure the right people made the right decisions about risk.