One working definition of organizational governance for our class is: The way in which an organization not only chooses to manage itself in achieving specific outcomes, from the executive suite to the production line, but also how it monitors itself to ensure that the desired policies and procedures are actually being implemented as intended. These are related to Sections 6, 7, 8 and 9 of "A Risk Management Standard."

There is a lot in this definition. You can almost treat governance as a philosophical as well as operational framework. The concept of change is intrinsic to governance, especially for an organization which chooses to implement a new governance policy. The organizational personnel must be motivated to change their way of thinking and operating from how it has "always been" to what the governance committee determined is the desired new norm. Creating change within organizations is only possible within the cultural norms of that organization. With this background you can now see why the authors of our class textbook chose to cover these topics in detail in Chapters 3 and 4.