The Business Revolution Episode 14

In this captivating episode of The Business Revolution, we complete our ESG series by diving into the often-misunderstood but absolutely critical “G” for Governance.

We’re joined by Perrin Carey, the visionary founder and CEO of CoSteer, who radically redefines governance beyond rigid checklists and compliance.

Perrin unveils a powerful vision of governance as “beautiful synchronicity,” akin to a murmuration of starlings, an interconnected, non-hierarchical system centered on shared purpose and values. Perrin explains how the true essence of governance lies in the quality of the millions of daily decisions made across an organisation, not just in the boardroom.

This episode will challenge your perceptions and offer profound insights into:

Why traditional, rigid governance models are a risk and how adaptability is key to organisational survival and agility.
How embedding core values and purpose into decision-making frameworks fosters a living, human system of governance.
The immense role of AI in improving decision quality, when approached with a human touch.
Practical applications of biomimicry, showing how decentralised, interconnected systems lead to robust outcomes.
The ultimate driver of good governance. Based on extensive research, Perrin reveals the single most influential factor in high-quality decision-making is compassion.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that will inspire you to see governance as a dynamic opportunity, a competitive edge and a path to building institutions worth inheriting.

Bio

Perrin Carey is the visionary founder and CEO of CoSteer, a technology business dedicated to integrating governance effectively into organisations. Perrin;s work stems from extensive research into how to move beyond traditional, process-driven governance towards a more holistic and human-centered approach, focusing on enhancing the quality of decision-making within organisations.

Links

CoSteer website: www.costeer.co

CoSteer’s research at the Good Governance Academy: goodgovernance.academy/research

CoSteer’s research report: www.costeer.co/2025report

ISO 37000 – The Governance of Organisations

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My call to CEOs – about the “G” in ESG

Episode 14 links

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Transcript – episode 14

Alan Taylor (00:00)
Well, welcome – or welcome back – to The Business Revolution, the podcast where we’re rewriting the rules of business for a sustainable future. I’m Alan, your co-host.

Cherry Ward (00:08)
And I’m Cherry.

Mik Aidt (00:09)
And I’m Mik. We are your guides, or we would like to be your guides on this journey to explore the intersection of business, sustainability and positive change.

Alan Taylor (00:19)
And to do that every episode will bring you inspiring conversation with experts, entrepreneurs, change makers, or proving that sustainability isn’t just good for the planet, it’s actually good for business.

Cherry Ward (00:30)
So we will uncover innovative solutions, share practical strategies and discover new trends that will shape the future of sustainable business.

Mik Aidt (00:39)
Whether you are a seasoned CEO or a budding entrepreneur or simply curious about how to make a difference in the business world, well, you’ve come to the right place.

Alan Taylor (00:49)
So I hope you’ve got your cup of tea or your sustainable favorite brew to settle in and be ready to be inspired. This is The Business Revolution.

Mik Aidt (00:57)
In this episode, we’re going to explore the often overlooked but very important, the crucial ‘G’ in ESG, governance.

Alan Taylor (01:07)
And to help us explore the intricacies of good governance and its impact on sustainable business practices. We are super thrilled to welcome Perrin Carey, the visionary founder and CEO of CoSteer.

Cherry Ward (01:18)
Welcome Perrin. Perrin brings a wealth of experience in helping organisations navigate the complexities of modern governance. Co-Steer is at the forefront of providing innovative solutions that empower businesses to build robust and transparent governance frameworks. So Perrin, can you tell us a bit about CoSteer and specifically how you and CoSteer address the G in ESG?

Perrin Carey (01:43)
Goodness, that’s a whole podcast just in one question there, Cherry. But very quickly, because I really want to dive into our perspectives on governance. But firstly, it was born out of a research project that I did for a master’s degree back in 2018. But it has been a long standing challenge of mine as to how do we integrate governance properly into organisations.
That research led to a deep exploration through the years of COVID and then the development of a piece of technology which supports organisations. So CoSteer is an unusual business. It’s a tech business, but in the space of governance. Your second bit of that question, we’re going to have to dive in separately. So you see, let’s look at the way that we see governance currently, most of us.
We see governance most commonly as a process driven framework, often surrounded by aspects of compliance, maybe risk management. And in the ESG space, it sits as this tag on at the end of this acronym. But imagine if you would something different. Picture that beautiful spectacle in the sky that you see at dusk. Starlings in murmuration. You can see it across woodlands and across seaside towns in the UK, the US, around the world. That for me is governance. Governance is beautiful synchronicity. It’s interconnectedness.
It’s a group of human beings centralised around a common purpose with really clear shared values. No hierarchical leadership, decentralised decision making. And if you can imagine that transition of moving an organisation, a group of organisations, a whole concept towards that type of ideology, then you move into a different space. You move into a world where governance is in fact beautiful. And that isn’t something you hear often in boardrooms.

Cherry Ward (03:55)
No, absolutely not. I love that that starling that murmuration Perrin. I think, you know, I’ve worked in that space and often governance is about hierarchy. It’s about delegations of authority, who can make those decisions and structures and processes. So how are you working with organisations to to make that shift to think differently about governance. I think it’s almost like as you said earlier, the G has to come before the E and the S.

Perrin Carey (04:24)
Yeah, how do we do it? I’ll come on to a minute. I think my, my ideal is that these three things are completely interconnected, they’re interwoven. And we’ve, we’ve given it an acronym, because that helps us as human beings, what we tend to then do, because we are human beings, and therefore we, we’re almost obsessed with linearity.

Cherry Ward (04:27)
Yes.

Perrin Carey (04:47)
So we go, ooh, there’s an E, ooh, there’s an S, ooh, there’s a G. But really these three elements are utterly interconnected and interwoven. So how do we address this with boards and leadership and organisations? I think we tackle it first and foremost by just clarifying that governance is not corporate governance.
Governance is really about the quality of the decisions that are cascading and rippling across your organisation every single day. So there was a Harvard Business Review that was done a while ago looking at the number of decisions that we make as human beings today. 33,000. 33,000 decisions.
Now even if you just go into the workplace and you extract eight hours of a day, suddenly you’re at 10,000.
Multiply that up across people in your organisation. You are talking about millions and millions of decisions that are made every single day in your organisation. For me, governance is everything that informs, that wraps, that begins to inspire the quality of those decisions across your organisation.
And so once you begin to have a conversation in that vein, then governance becomes a living thing. It’s not something that sits on a policy or a piece of paper or an intranet. It becomes a living human system. And that’s how we approach governance with organisations as a living human system.

Alan Taylor (06:25)
Wow, that sounds beautiful. I’ve worked in environments where you’ve got a reasonable level of alignment and that alone is a massive improvement, but this is taking it two or three levels further. What are some of the big challenges that you’re seeing in leadership, I guess, to overcoming that and to actually become that one?

Perrin Carey (06:46)
Wow, there are lots of challenges. A lot of it is around education, an acknowledgement of the fact that governance is in fact, this deeper, broader living thing. I think once leaders have gone on that journey of acknowledgement, there’s a kind of wave that comes with them. And we see this across organisations and leadership.
What we’ve found is that when leaders have the opportunity to measure and observe the governance in their organisations, then it comes alive. And so the challenge that we addressed really at CoSteer was, can we begin to bring alive in visual form governance, rather than it being this report that’s done you know, every year and we go through and we comply or we explain or we do both of those. We list all the policies and procedures that we do.
We pat ourselves on the back because we’ve written great minutes. And I’m not saying that any of these things are unimportant. But we need to think of the purpose of all of these things. Because purpose is the core of everything, right? The purpose of good minutes, the purpose of a policy, the purpose of having procedures, controls and frameworks and systems is to improve decision making.
And if you can bring that living system of decision making alive in a visual form, then you bring leadership, you bring boards right with you. And that’s what we’ve built and created. And I know this is not about us sort of talking in detail about that. But I think if you can visualise that in some way, then you bring boards and leadership on that journey.

Alan Taylor (08:23)
It sounds, it sounds like you, and I feel like I’m paraphrasing some of the things you said, but it sounds like you’re taking what is an abstract concept and making it tangible, making it realistic because people can see something and then you can hold the mirror back to them so that they can sort of relate to it and know that it is them. Is that, does that sound about right?

Perrin Carey (08:42)
I would say that’s a brilliant summary of what we do. We endeavor to… So let’s go back to that murmuration that we were talking about earlier. So what we have been able to do is visually show where all of the people are in your organisation in relation to each other around 27 core themes of what we will call governance, but you could call organisational efficacy, right? So what we’ve been able to do is create a visual image of that for organisations.
So imagine being able to look at a screen or look at a piece of paper and say, this is where our people are in relation to each other on the performance of our organisation right now. We know the direction we want to go in.
And in a few months time, we’re going to retake that picture and we’re going to observe how people have moved over time in relation to each of these aspects that we measure, but also in relation to each other, because this isn’t just about, the organisation performing? It is also very much about where people are in relation to others. And it’ll probably, it’ll come up later in some of our conversation about how we do that.
But yes, you’re right, Alan. It’s really about trying to visualise what has become a compliance paper-driven tick box exercise into a living exercise. Yeah.

Mik Aidt (10:09)
How does AI come into that room? Is it an enemy or is it a friend?

Perrin Carey (10:14)
I would say it could be an enemy or a friend. It depends on the human touch of that. And I think this is true for all of, let’s say, generative AI. I use that term more deliberately. We’ve utilised AI for the last six years. Our AI is very much from the 1960s. It’s about high powered mathematical computation, looking at interconnections and interrelationships and trying to understand the living system.
Generative AI is completely different. It uses large language models to obviously support human work if the human touch is positive. So where does it come in? I think it comes in across the piece. If we go back again, and I’ll keep coming back to this, governance is about quality of the decisions that we’re making as human beings.
If there is anything that can support quality of decisions that we make, both individually, let’s say 10,000 decisions we make, if we can improve the quality of those decisions every day, and if we can improve the quality of the decision making collectively. Now, often when we think about the ESG space, we are talking about decisions at leadership or board levels in terms of the direction of travel of an organisation towards environmentally sustainable and reciprocal engagement with nature. Then the quality of their decisions collectively is so critical.
We think that we’re good at making collective decisions. I would argue that we’re not that good at making collective decisions. There are numbers of reasons for that. One of them is principally being human and some of the innate challenges that we face as being human. Happy to come onto that. But I would say AI plays a critical role and can play an important an immense role in improving the quality of the decisions we make and then how well we implement those decisions. So yes, multiple factors, multiple ways, traditional AI, machine learning, we utilise all of this. So yes, it can absolutely have an impact.

Alan Taylor (12:17)
You remind me of another theme in here, because when people talk about AI and from Mik’s question, it’s almost like a risk perspective. But I’m going to move away from AI and just stay with the word risk.
Staying with, going with the murmuration, you’ve got the leaders at the front of the flock and you’ve got whatever, I don’t know the dynamics of the birds in this, you’ve got the followers who are definitely going to be changing along the way and everybody is adapting as the whole flock moves around. In a corporate setting, that’s… that could be perceived from a leader perspective, that that’s a risk that the flock isn’t going to follow, that the risk is going to go their own direction, or that others won’t even notice that they’re coming and so there’s going to be a mid-air collision. How is risk sort of managed in this space?

Perrin Carey (13:02)
Okay, wow, what a brilliant question. I’m gonna try and tie these things all together, right?
What you were saying, Alan, about Starlings and Mammaration, and I’m going to just correct you on one thing. There is no leadership. Leadership is completely decentralised in Starlings when they perform Mammaration. How, therefore, do they manage to do what they do with almost no collisions?
So if you look at some of these spectacles, they’re 40, 50, 100,000 birds up in the sky and there won’t be a single collision. So the way that they do this is, and this has been evidenced by research conducted by Giorgio Parisi in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And he videoed Starling’s ememoration across the city of Italy.
So Roman in Italy. And he observed that each starling takes reference from its seven immediate neighbors.
Now just translate that to organisations and people. What we know from psychology and what we know from behavioral science is that our behaviors are most significantly influenced by seven people.
So when we think about the behaviors across an organisation, we actually don’t take our steer necessarily from the executive leadership that stands three levels above us. We in fact take our steer of how we behave, how we perform, the nature of decisions that we make, the way we communicate with other people across our organisation. We take that steer from the seven most influential people around us.
Now in a flock of starlings, that’s the most immediate neighbor. But us as humans, we’re more sophisticated in the way that we observe patterns around us. So it doesn’t need to be our most proximal person to us sitting in the office. But it doesn’t really reach beyond seven.

Because it’s too much for us to take in, it’s too much noise, right, going on. So we essentially tune in to the seven most influential people around us. So coming back to your question, I’m trying to relate this back to your question about risk. The real risk to organisations is in fact rigidity and the inability to adapt and move.
The most common reason for organisational, let’s say, an organisation ceasing to exist in some form, is actually the inability to adapt. And I’m make one other biological reference here. We’ve been taught that it’s the survival of the fittest. But that’s actually a misquote, right? It’s not the survival of the fittest, it’s the survival of those most able to adapt.
And we know this now from all of our studies across ecology. And so it’s the same in organisations. So the biggest risk in organisations, inability to adapt, and the inability to adapt comes from rigidity. Rigidity comes in most organisations due to highly structured hierarchy, highly process driven policy orientated organisations with incredibly rigid decision making frameworks.
And what we’re seeing in many organisations now is a gradual move towards decentralising some of that decision making. How do you do that and at the same time mitigate risk and open up opportunity? Well, how we do that with organisations is we move organisations towards a really clear purpose and values orientated decision framework.
So rather than decisions being dictated to by systems and controls, exclusively, we move towards a collaborative approach where decisions can be made both through a system and control. So there are still systems and controls and they are important and they do mitigate risk. But we also encourage leadership to really embed the core values of their organisation into their decision making.
And surround those decisions with the purpose of their organisation. So take an example in a boardroom or even in a meeting, you come across something that you haven’t had to experience before. You’ve got to make a decision. There is no system. There is no process. There is no policy that surrounds this decision. It’s like out of the box. And what we encourage teams to do is to
Observe the purpose, embed that into the decision, look at the values, address those values as you walk through your collective decision making process. And then what we find is when you come out the other side, you’ve actually made an incredibly powerful decision that’s onboarding the concepts of risk, but most importantly, creates an agile organisation that can take opportunity.
So hopefully that kind of understand and trying to bring the biomimicry into human organisations because it’s tangible, it exists, it’s real. We’ve seen it, it’s operating across our clients right now and it’s beautiful to see.

Mik Aidt (18:04)
I’m so excited. You have really changed the G in ESG for me and made it into something I want to know a lot more about. Unfortunately, our podcasts are usually not that long, so we’ll have to refer our listeners and YouTube viewers to your website. Or what would you be your advice to where do we go from here? I’m excited now. I want to know more. Where do I go?

Perrin Carey (18:28)
Where do you go? Okay. If you want to see more about our work, yes, there’s our website. But actually, and maybe we can put this link in whatever comes out. We’ve been running a research program for the last five years with the Good Governance Academy in South Africa, but there are global governance, not for profit, trying to shift governance towards this more human living system perspective.
And you can find a lot of our videos and research presented back. And here is where I talk a lot more about these ideas in a lot more detail. Other than that, for those that are more kind of interested in hardcore kind of governance, I would point you in the direction of the newly recently published in 2021-22, Organisational Governance from the ISO.
It’s ISO 37,000. It talks about organisational governance from this perspective that it is a system, it’s an interconnected system. And as a model, puts organisational purpose at the heart of governance. And therefore it’s truly leading the way in governance. So those are the two places I would probably point people.
Thank you. Yeah, we are working with a couple of governance and government organisations in the Channel Islands. So yeah, it’s certainly something of interest that’s developed.

Cherry Ward (19:50)
One last question, Perrin. If you had advice for CEOs and business leaders around governance, what would that be if we were able to broadcast this live to every single business leader out there?

Perrin Carey (20:02)
I would say of the five years of research that we’ve been doing, we’ve collected 50,000 data points. We’ve carried out over two million, I guess, interrelationships, analysis of interrelationships between different factors of organisational governance. There is one thing that emerges time and time again as being the most influential factor on the quality of both individual and collective decision making.
And its compassion. It’s compassion for ourselves and it’s compassion for others. And I think if there was one message that I had for leaders across the world.
Be kind to yourself and be kind to others because that is the biggest driver of high quality individual and collective decision making. It is leaps and bounds ahead of everything else that we’re observing in organisational systems. That would be my advice.

Alan Taylor (21:02)
That is a wonderful way to end the session today, this episode of The Business Revolution. It’s so thought-provoking and wonderful, and I certainly hope that we’ll get many people to hear that because that’s fantastic. Thank you. We hope that everybody has enjoyed diving deep into the world of business and sustainability with us in this very different episode, thinking in very different ways. So thank you very much, Perrin.

Perrin Carey (21:25)
Thank you very much for me.

Cherry Ward (21:26)
Thanks, Perrin. And to our listeners, remember the revolution doesn’t end here. So it’s up to each and every one of us to take this knowledge and inspiration from today’s episode and turn it into action.

Mik Aidt (21:39)
Whether that’s implementing sustainable practices in your own business or advocating for change in your community, every step counts towards building that better future.

Alan Taylor (21:50)
And don’t forget to visit our website at businessrevolution.earth for more resources, past episodes and ways to actually get involved with us.

Cherry Ward (21:57)
And also if you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to hit subscribe, rate and review the business revolution on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback really helps us to reach more listeners and amplify our impact.

Alan Taylor (22:11)
So thanks for joining us on this journey of transformation. Together we can revolutionise the way we all do business and create a world that’s sustainable for generations to come.

Mik Aidt (22:20)
Stay tuned for insights, inspiration and actionable steps to help reshape the way we do business for a better tomorrow.

Cherry Ward (22:28)
So until next time, keep innovating, keep inspiring and keep pushing for positive change. This is Cherry.

Mik Aidt (22:34)
This is Mik

Alan Taylor (22:35)
Alan signing off. The business revolution starts with you.

Cherry Ward (22:41)
One last message before we wrap up this episode as part of the demystifying ESG series we have a message from two CEOs on governance.

CEO 1 (at 22:54)
Thank you for taking the time to listen. I know you’re busy, you’re steering organisations through turbulent times, making decisions that carry weight far beyond your boardroom. We’ve spoken about the E, we’ve spoken about the S, but today let’s talk about the G in ESG, governance, and why it’s far more than a checklist or a compliance box.

Let me be clear, governance is not just about minutes and manuals. It’s not about control for control’s sake. It’s about decision making. And decision making is everything. Every risk you navigate, every opportunity you seize, every value you claim to uphold, it all comes down to the quality of the decisions made across your organisation.

CEO 2 (at 23:40)
Most people see governance as a process, a structure, a hierarchy. But that mindset is part of the problem. Because rigid governance systems often collapse under pressure. They don’t adapt. They don’t breathe. The future belongs to organisations that can flex, move and respond. Not with chaos, but with coherence. And that’s why I want you to imagine governance differently. Not as rules from the top, but as alignment across the system.

Think of a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds, no single leader, moving in perfect synchrony. Each bird responds to its seven closest neighbours, creating a living breathing system that is agile, adaptive and beautiful. That is what governance could be. That is what governance must become. Because the greatest risk to your business is not disruption, not competition, it’s rigidity. It’s the inability to change.

And let’s be honest, most companies are still trapped in outdated governance models built for a different century. Models that silo responsibility, that kill innovation, that treat compliance as the end goal instead of a baseline.

We need to shift from hierarchy to purpose, from control to compassion, from tick boxes to trust. Governance done right builds culture. It creates psychological safety. It empowers your people to make better decisions at every level.

And yes, governance is where your values become real, not in your brochures, but in the lived experience of your employees, your partners, your stakeholders. And here’s what we’ve learned from the data. The single biggest driver of high quality decisions, the kind that build resilient, ethical, thriving companies, is compassion. Not process, not policy.

Compassion for others for yourself because humans don’t take cues from distant leaders or codes of conduct We take them from each other from the people we trust the people closest to us. Just like those birds in flight

So here is my challenge to you. Stop thinking of governance as a burden. Start seeing it as the opportunity it truly is. To rewire your organisation around purpose, around people, and around principles that scale. Make it visible. Make it living. Make it your competitive edge. Because when governance is alive, your company becomes alive.
And when governance is beautiful, your business becomes part of something much bigger than itself.

So decide, will your legacy be brittle and outdated or adaptive and aligned with the future? Because the world is watching, employees are watching, investors are watching and the next generation is asking, are you building institutions worth inheriting?

Implementing ESG, truly embedding it into the DNA of your company, can feel daunting. It takes time. It takes courage. It means rewiring old systems and letting go of comfortable habits. But here’s the truth. The return is real. Strong governance doesn’t just build trust. It builds better strategy, smarter decisions and long-term resilience. It protects your company’s future while contributing to the planet’s future.

So yes, it takes effort, but it’s worth it. For your people, for your business, for our shared home. And without any doubt, this is why you and we will be on the right side of history.

Ban Ki-moon, former UN Chief:
It may sound strange to be speaking of revolution but that is what we need at this time. We need a revolution. Revolutionary action.

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