Being Intentional with Governance Policies. Part 1: Designing Governance That Knows Its “Why”
This article kicks off a two-part series on intentional governance — how to design policies that actually work, and then how to bring them to life through collaboration and automation.
Most organizations don’t lack governance frameworks.
They lack intentionality.
CIS, NIST, ISO, HIPAA — the binders, dashboards, and policy spreadsheets pile up. Every year, new frameworks are layered on top of old ones. Yet ask anyone running security, risk, or compliance if governance feels coherent, and the answer is usually some version of “not really.”
The problem isn’t that the frameworks are wrong.
It’s that they were never designed around the organization’s purpose in the first place.
Governance Fails When It’s Reactive
Governance frameworks are supposed to be strategic instruments. But too often, they’re implemented reactively — in response to a new audit finding, a regulation, or a customer questionnaire. The result: policies that are written for compliance rather than clarity, and programs that track activities instead of outcomes.
Reactive governance creates three familiar symptoms:
Policy sprawl — hundreds of overlapping or conflicting rules.
Misaligned incentives — security and operations teams working toward different outcomes.
Invisible success — nobody can prove whether governance efforts are improving risk posture or just generating evidence.
That’s what happens when governance starts with the what instead of the why.
Start With the “Why”
Every policy should begin with a question:
What outcome is this policy designed to achieve?
Efficiency? Assurance? Regulatory alignment? Risk reduction? Cultural maturity?
Without this anchor, even the best frameworks become busywork. The purpose statement isn’t a line in a policy preamble — it’s a design requirement. It determines how the policy will be measured, how it will evolve, and how it connects to business strategy.
A simple litmus test: if you can’t describe the intent of a policy in one sentence that an engineer and an auditor would both agree on, the policy isn’t ready for implementation.
A policy without purpose is just an unmeasured control.
Principles Over Templates
Frameworks like NIST 800-53 or CIS Controls are excellent references, but governance collapses when they’re copied wholesale. Every enterprise has a unique combination of business drivers, regulatory exposure, and infrastructure maturity. Implementing external frameworks “as-is” treats governance as documentation, not design.
Intentional governance flips that logic.
Start with principles, not templates.
Then align frameworks to those principles.
For example:
A principle might be “All access decisions must be justifiable and time-bounded.”
The frameworks (CIS v8, NIST AC-2, ISO 27001 A.9) become lenses to interpret and verify that principle, not dictate it.
This approach yields shared guardrails rather than rigid uniformity — a hallmark of federated governance. Business units can tailor their execution while still aligning with enterprise-wide intent.
Design for Adaptability
A policy shouldn’t just answer today’s question; it should anticipate tomorrow’s change.
That means designing for measurability and iteration from day one:
Define how success will be measured (e.g., SLA adherence, closure rate of risk findings).
Treat policies as versioned artifacts — living components that evolve alongside systems and people.
Embed accountability models like RACI or ABAC early, so ownership is explicit and traceable.
This mindset prepares governance for automation and scalability later. Because what you can’t measure, you can’t automate — and what you can’t automate will eventually break under scale.
From Design to Implementation
Intentional design is the foundation. But intent alone doesn’t operationalize itself.
That’s where most governance programs stall — in the gap between policy design and policy reality.
Bridging that gap requires two things:
Collaboration — bringing operations, risk, compliance, and audit into one conversation, not three.
Infrastructure — a platform that can translate intent into logic, logic into code, and code into measurable data.
That’s the focus of Part 2 of this series. We’ll explore how a governance platform can serve as the environment where stakeholders co-create, codify, and continuously validate their policies — so governance stops being paperwork and starts being practice.
Closing Thought
Governance isn’t something you adopt; it’s something you design.
It’s a reflection of how well your organization understands its purpose and turns that understanding into measurable, adaptable policy.
Design your governance with intent — before your intent gets lost in governance.