I have sat in more steering committees than I can count. Well-structured agendas. Clear reporting packs. Traffic lights carefully prepared. On paper, everything looked exactly as it should. And yet, after many of these meetings, I would leave thinking the same thing: nothing has actually been decided.
That observation took years to fully understand. The problem was not the preparation, not the people, and not the format. It was a fundamental mismatch between what steering committees are designed to do and what they are routinely asked to do.
The Illusion of Governance
Steering committees are designed to provide oversight, enable decision-making, and align leadership. In theory, they are the place where direction is set and significant decisions are taken. In practice, they tend to become something different: status updates, risk reporting sessions, and carefully managed discussions that are important but not decisive.
In one programme, we had a monthly executive steering forum with senior stakeholders from across the organisation. Every meeting had a solid structure: progress updates, major risks, key decisions required. The problem was that decisions were rarely taken in the room. Discussions were deferred, smaller follow-up meetings were scheduled, or — most commonly — decisions were made outside the forum entirely. The steering committee had become a place where issues were presented, not resolved.
This is not a failure of individual steering committees. It is a structural feature of how large organisations make decisions — and understanding it changes how you prepare for, and use, formal governance forums.
Why It Happens
The same underlying reasons appear across organisations and sectors. None of them are difficult to understand, but each of them is genuinely difficult to address within the constraints of a formal governance setting.
The Moment It Became Clear
In one programme, we had a critical dependency that required resolution at executive level — a vendor commitment that was blocking three workstreams. We presented it in the steering committee. It was acknowledged. It was discussed. It was deferred.
The same item appeared on the agenda for three consecutive monthly meetings. Each time: acknowledged, discussed, deferred. Eventually, it escalated outside the forum and was resolved in a direct conversation between two executives who had the authority and the relationship to reach a decision without the apparatus of the steering committee around them.
The more formal the setting, the harder it sometimes is to make real decisions. The formal setting creates the pressure to manage the room — and managing the room is a different objective from making the decision.
What Actually Works
Over time, I changed how I use steering committees — and the change was primarily about what I stopped trying to do in them, rather than what I added.
The meeting should be used for visibility, not detailed debate. Decisions should be escalated in a form that is clearly defined and binary where possible — not as open-ended discussions where the path to resolution is unclear. The most important work happens before the meeting: individual conversations with the key stakeholders that surface the real positions, identify where genuine disagreement exists, and establish who owns the outcome going into the room.
The steering committee should confirm decisions that have already been substantially shaped. When it is asked to create them from scratch, it will almost always disappoint.
This is not a criticism of steering committees as a governance mechanism. It is a recognition of what they are genuinely suited for — and a reminder that the work of building alignment is done in conversations, not meetings.
Steering committees do not fail because they are badly designed or because the wrong people are in the room. They fail when we expect them to do something they are structurally unsuited for.
Real decisions are rarely made in large, formal settings. They are shaped beforehand — in conversations, in relationships, in the informal alignment that precedes the formal forum — and confirmed afterwards.
Understanding this does not make the steering committee less important. It makes the preparation for it considerably more important.