Insights

For a long time, deleting data could feel strangely reckless. Storage was cheap, and information was potentially valuable. The cost of keeping another year of customer records, internal correspondence, transaction histories or old documents was difficult to see, while the cost of deleting the wrong thing was easy to imagine. So companies kept it. Some of it was retained for legal or operational reasons, some because nobody was quite sure whether it could safely be destroyed, and some because of the most durable retention policy in corporate life: we might need it someday.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what I called the Draupnir Effect, borrowing from the golden ring in Norse mythology that produced eight new rings every ninth night. It seemed an appropriate metaphor for what I was watching happen across the GRC technology market. New risk applications, compliance tools, AI governance solutions, third-party risk platforms, control-testing engines, and supposedly comprehensive GRC platforms were appearing at an extraordinary pace, many of them built with a speed that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

Imagine the boardroom in 2036. Artificial intelligence has become part of how the company operates. It tests capital choices, monitors risk, compares strategic alternatives and makes thousands of decisions within limits established by management and the board.

In a founder-centric organization, the founder isn’t just the CEO. They’re the mascot, the mythology, the exception to the rules, and the emotional thermostat of the building. Identity, authority, and narrative all get bundled into one human nervous system. That’s efficient. It’s also a little like running a power grid through a single extension cord.

On the morning of July 16, I looked outside in Milwaukee and the city seemed to have misplaced its horizon. The light had that strange, dirty cast that wildfire smoke gives it, and the air smelled faintly burned. This was Wisconsin, not a community evacuating ahead of a fire line. Nothing nearby was burning. The fires were hundreds of miles away, in northern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters and across Canada. Yet by then, the distinction between where the disaster was happening and where its consequences were being felt had become almost meaningless.

Whenever I tell people that I work in Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), the reaction is usually the same. “So, you spend your day writing policies?” It’s a fair question because, from the outside, that’s exactly what GRC looks like. Before I started working in this field, I probably would have said the same thing. The reality is very different.

I recently posed what I believe is one of the most important unanswered questions in governance on LinkedIn: Who is auditing the governance framework? The responses confirmed two things. First, many practitioners instinctively recognize the gap. Second, there is still remarkably little agreement on who should be responsible for assessing governance effectiveness or even what "effective governance" actually means. That conversation reinforced why I have been asking this question for decades.