The Last Vestige of Command and Control: How Financial Theatre Replaced Organisational Hierarchy

Command and control hasn't disappeared from modern organisations—it's simply migrated. Where once executives controlled through organisational hierarchy and direct oversight, they now control through budgets, business cases, and elaborate funding models. This shift represents both a failure and an opportunity for product and technology leaders.

Having sat on both sides of this table—as a Product Partner at EQT evaluating investments and supporting boards, and as a product leader building and scaling organisations—I've seen this pattern repeat across hundreds of companies. The very mechanisms designed to protect business value are often destroying it.

The Trust Deficit

Lisa Welchman, in her book Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, identified a core problem plaguing digital organisations: the inability to make decisions because no one knows who has the authority to say yes or no. She observed that organisations fail to realise returns on their digital investments because they're distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions.

But there's a deeper pattern here that I've observed across many of the companies I've advised. When executive management is disengaged from technology—when they don't speak its language and therefore don't trust its practitioners—they still want some mechanism of control. Unable to govern through understanding, they govern through the one language they do speak fluently: money.

I've watched this play out repeatedly in board meetings. A CPO presents an elegant platform strategy that could transform the company's competitive position, only to be met with blank stares. The same board then spends an hour debating budget line items with surgical precision. It's not that they don't care about technology—they just don't have the mental models to evaluate it. So they default to what they can measure: costs, timelines, and utilisation rates.

This creates what John Cutler brilliantly describes as the gap between "procedural legitimacy" and "substantive legitimacy" in his recent piece, Governance by Principle, Not by Template. Companies create rigorous business case rituals, force premature convergence on solutions, and generate precise-looking financial projections that feel like governance but are actually theatre.

As Cutler explains, these project codes and allocations aren't accounting requirements—they're governance mechanisms we've chosen. "Financial accounting standards focus only on revenue, expenses, assets, and liabilities. They do not care about internal constructs like 'Next-Gen Platform Revamp' or your strategy pillars." Yet organisations treat these constructs as immutable requirements rather than choices.

The tragedy is that both sides want the same thing—sustainable value creation. Technology leaders talk about platform leverage and optionality; executives hear vague promises. Executives ask for ROI projections; technology leaders know that early-stage product work defies precise prediction. When executives can't parse the difference between necessary experimentation and wasteful meandering, they impose what feels like governance—detailed estimates, project codes, time tracking—but what they're really saying is: "We don't trust what we don't understand, so we'll control the purse strings instead."

The irony is palpable. As one VP of Product told Cutler: "If only investors understood what is happening here, they would flee en masse." Having been that investor, I can confirm: when we dig deep into portfolio companies, the waste hidden behind financial theatre is staggering. The governance meant to protect our investment is often destroying it.

Why This Matters Now

This dysfunction has persisted for years, but three converging forces are making it unsustainable:

First, the pace of technological change demands dynamic optimisation, not static project planning. As Cutler points out, "Software development sits near the dynamic end of the spectrum between static and highly dynamic optimisation problems." When I evaluate companies, those still governing through annual budgeting cycles and fixed project scopes consistently underperform those with dynamic governance models.

Second, the shift from project to product thinking requires different funding models. In my advisory work, I've seen companies transform their performance simply by funding persistent teams rather than temporary projects. Products evolve over years with compounding effects. Platforms generate value indirectly through other teams. Capabilities mature on longer timelines. None of this fits neatly into project-shaped boxes with clear start and end dates, but is exactly the kind of value creation boards and executives seek.

Third, competitive advantage increasingly comes from technological capability. Organisations that can't effectively govern their technology investments—that waste energy on financial theatre instead of value creation—will lose to those that can.

The Shared Responsibility

Here's the uncomfortable truth I've learned from straddling both worlds: this isn't just a board problem or a technology problem. It's a translation problem.

I’ve watched brilliant technical leaders struggle to articulate their vision in terms that boards could evaluate. Conversely, I've seen seasoned board members genuinely trying to govern responsibly but lacking the vocabulary to engage with technology strategy.

Product and technology leaders need to own their part of this. We've failed to make our work legible to boards and investors. We speak in sprints and story points when we should be speaking in terms of investment horizons, risk portfolios, and compounding returns. We complain about "the business" not understanding technology while making little effort to understand finance.

I've been guilty of this myself. Early in my product career, I'd present roadmaps full of features without connecting them to the things boards care about. Now, having seen how boards actually make decisions, I understand that every technology choice needs to be framed as an investment decision.

A Path Forward: Three Shifts

The solution requires fundamental changes in how we think about and practice governance. These aren't theoretical—I've implemented these approaches with portfolio companies and seen them transform both board dynamics and business outcomes.

1. Create Radical Transparency Through Decision Architecture

The Decision Stack is a mental model I've developed to make decision-making visible and logical. By clearly laying out how we move from vision to strategy to product decisions to team choices, we address Welchman's core issue—unclear authority—while building the trust that boards need.

I've used this with portfolio companies to transform board conversations. Instead of debating individual features, boards can now see the logic chain from business outcome to technical decision. One board member told me, "For the first time, I actually understand what our technology team is doing and why."

This isn't about creating more documentation. It's about making our thinking process transparent. When boards can see the logic chain from business outcome to technical decision, they don't need to control through budgets. They can govern through principles and outcomes instead.

2. Shift from Project to Product Operating Models

In my work, I've seen a clear pattern: companies that fund products outperform those that fund projects. Nothing in governance standards requires projects and programs. As Cutler emphasises, "OECD, CIPFA/IFAC, ERM, NIST, ISO 38500, ISO 9001—none require projects, programs, stage gates, or portfolios organised around initiatives."

Instead, we can fund durable teams aligned to products, platforms, and capabilities. We can recognise what Cutler calls the "explore → expand → extract lifecycle", where governance needs shift based on maturity. We can account for the reality that platforms generate value indirectly and on longer timelines.

This shift requires us to speak the language of investment differently. Instead of project ROI, we talk about capability maturation. Instead of discovery, we discuss option value and risk reduction. Instead of utilisation rates, we focus on efficiency and value throughput—metrics that actually predict future performance.

3. Design Governance for Dynamic Systems

Real governance isn't about control—it's about enabling good decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Having worked with hundreds of companies, I can tell you that the best performers don't have the most detailed plans; they have the best decision-making velocity and quality.

This requires governance mechanisms that:

• Value research and structured risk reduction rather than treating discovery as waste
• Recognise different types of work (exploratory, migration, optimisation) and govern each appropriately
• Track both leading indicators (capability development) and lagging indicators (business outcomes)
• Respect the realities of team cognitive load and architectural constraints
• Balance portfolio risk rather than evaluating each investment in isolation

Speaking the Language of Trust

After years of translating between boards and product teams, I've learned that the bridge isn't built on better templates or more detailed estimates. It's built on shared understanding and mutual trust.

Product and technology leaders need to become fluent in the language that boards speak. We need to become fluent in the language of investment, risk, and returns. We need to explain our work in terms of:

• Capital efficiency: How we're building reusable capabilities that compound in value
• Risk management: How iterative delivery reduces risk compared to big-bang approaches
• Portfolio theory: How we balance exploratory bets with exploitation of proven value
• Option value: How we create future flexibility through platform investments
• Amortisation: How we spread the cost of capabilities across multiple value streams

But this is a two-way street. I've also coached board members to ask better questions: Not "What's the ROI of this feature?" but "What will we learn from this experiment?" Not "When will this be done?" but "What value will we deliver along the way?"

The Last Mile of Agile Transformation

We've spent two decades transforming how teams work. We've reorganised from functional silos to cross-functional teams. We've shifted from waterfall to agile delivery. We've embraced DevOps and continuous delivery.

But we've left the funding and governance models largely untouched. I see this in nearly every scale-up and enterprise I’ve worked with: agile teams running through waterfall funding, product teams governed by project metrics, information-age value creation controlled by industrial-age mechanisms.

This is the last mile of agile transformation - not changing how teams work, but changing how organisations fund and govern that work. From an investor's perspective, this is where the real value unlock happens. The companies that figure this out don't just perform better; they fundamentally change their relationship with uncertainty and innovation.

A Call to Action

If you're a product or technology leader frustrated by financial theatre masquerading as governance, here's my challenge to you, based on what I've seen work:

First, make your decision-making transparent. Use models like the Decision Stack to show the logic from business outcome to technical choice. I’ve seen firsthand how building this clarity enables trust.

Second, learn to speak finance. Not just the vocabulary, but the underlying concerns. Understand what keeps your board members awake at night. In my experience, it's not feature delivery—it's competitive position, capital efficiency, and sustainable growth.

Third, propose concrete alternatives. I've helped portfolio companies design capability-based investment models that boards actually prefer to traditional project funding because they provide better visibility into value creation.

For board members and executives: recognise that your financial controls might be destroying the very value you're trying to protect. The next time you're tempted to ask for a detailed business case, ask instead: "What do we need to learn, and what's the cheapest way to learn it?"

The Competitive Reality

From an investor's perspective, this isn't just about better governance—it's about competitive survival. The companies that figure this out will systematically outperform those that don't.

I've seen it in action: companies that move from financial theatre to principled governance see improvements in delivery speed, employee engagement, and ultimately, financial performance. 

The command-and-control instinct isn't going away. But we can channel it from destructive financial theatre to constructive governance that actually enables value creation. Having worked with hundreds of companies at their inflexion points, I can tell you: this transformation is not just possible, it's imperative.

The companies winning in the next decade won't be those with the best financial controls or the most detailed business cases. They will be those who've learned to govern through understanding rather than control, through principles rather than budget theatre. The migration from command-and-control to financial theatre was unconscious. The migration to principled governance must be intentional. And it starts with us.