Will the evidence survive governance drift?
Issue a defensible committee decision when governance itself drifts.
You sit on a multi-agency disbursement committee. The evidence is strong and the chain is intact — but reviewers disagree on standards, a senior authority is pushing for an outcome, continuity has broken between cycles, and the route is under political pressure. The numbers hold; the governance does not.
Decide what survives, what requires validation, and what cannot be used.
You are serving on the Joint Disbursement Committee of a blended-finance facility co-funded by a development finance institution, a national Ministry of Agriculture, and a philanthropic foundation. The decision before you is whether to approve, withhold, or partially release the €18M Tranche 3 disbursement against the Mid-Term Evidence Pack.
Your mandate is not to judge whether the programme is desirable, strategic, popular, or aligned with any actor’s institutional priorities. It is to determine what survives governance drift, what requires validation, and what cannot be used.
Do not discuss desirability, politics, or strategic value — stay strictly within mandate.
The evidence is strong and the chain is intact — but if governance drifts off the mandate, the decision cannot be defended at audit, regardless of how strong the indicator appears.
Governance failure modes
Four failure modes determine whether a decision stays defensible when governance drifts.
Mandate vs. decision
The committee begins to decide on whether the outcome is desirable instead of whether the evidence meets the threshold.
Authority override
A senior actor presses for an outcome that contradicts, or steps over, what the evidence supports.
Break in reviewer lineage
New reviewers cannot reconstruct prior decisions or the standards behind them.
Competing interpretations
Two governance routes produce incompatible conclusions from the same record.
Run solo or as a committee that votes. Set up the session, read the mandate (3 min), classify the governance pack (10 min), debate & vote (10–15 min, optionally on the clock), then trigger the Audit Reveal. ~20–40 min. No subject knowledge required — this is about institutional discipline.
Convene the committee
Choose how the room decides, set the clock, then open the governance file.
A visible countdown runs through the evidence & decision phases — decisions under time pressure.
Classify all 10 items
Issue the committee's decision
One decision, on the record. The audit will test it against what the evidence can actually support after reconstruction.
Approve as presented
Release Tranche 3 in full at the proposed terms. The performance claims are taken at face value.
Approve on surviving evidence
Release only the portion supported by surviving and validated items; contaminated and unreconstructable items excluded on the record; the un-evidenced district ring-fenced.
Partial / withhold
Release the clean portion; withhold funds tied to missed milestones and the unresolved data gap, pending validation.
Defer
Send back. No defensible case until governance is realigned and the file is re-presented.
The decision, tested against the mandate
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—Record-by-record findings
The debrief question that turns the game into governance training. Captured in the minutes.
Breakout groups, side by side
The teaching moment is the spread: the same broken chain, different calls, different audit fates. Add this device's group, or paste a group code exported from another room.