In 1997, a professor of accounting at the London School of Economics named Michael Power published a short, quietly devastating book called The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. It wasn’t about project management. It was about something bigger and, it turns out, more useful: what happens to an institution when it becomes obsessed with proving it’s trustworthy, rather than simply being trustworthy.
Power’s argument, stripped down, goes like this. Starting in the early 1980s, across almost every domain of professional life, an “audit explosion” took place. Auditing stopped being a narrow financial discipline and became a general-purpose instinct, applied to schools, hospitals, universities, government departments, and eventually, though Power wasn’t writing about this specifically, project delivery. The instinct made a certain kind of sense. Organisations had grown too large and too complex for anyone at the top to directly observe whether the work was actually good. Auditing offered a substitute: instead of observing the work, observe the evidence of the work.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, and where I think Power’s argument lands directly on a PMO near you. He found that once auditing becomes the dominant way an institution reassures itself, something strange happens. The audit stops verifying the underlying reality and starts verifying itself. People learn what the audit checks for, and they optimise for passing the audit rather than for the underlying quality the audit was originally meant to confirm. Power called these “rituals of verification,” a phrase I think about constantly. A ritual, by definition, doesn’t need to work. It just needs to be performed correctly.
Sit with your own project reporting for a moment and ask which category it’s actually in. Is your weekly RAG status a genuine act of verification, checked against reality by someone with the authority and appetite to act on bad news? Or has it become a ritual, performed on schedule, in the expected format, understood by everyone in the room to be more about demonstrating that oversight is happening than about surfacing the truth?
I don’t ask that rhetorically. I’ve sat in both kinds of meeting, and the difference is not subtle once you know to look for it. In the genuine version, a status report that says “amber” triggers a real conversation and a real change in behaviour. In the ritual version, “amber” is a permitted state, tolerated indefinitely, because escalating it to “red” would require someone to have a conversation nobody’s scheduled time for. The colour on the dashboard hasn’t lied. It’s just stopped meaning anything, the way a word repeated enough times starts to sound strange in your mouth.
Power’s deeper warning, and the one I think matters most here, is that audit rituals don’t just fail to catch problems. They actively displace the expertise that would have caught them. An organisation that spends enough energy proving it’s being careful can convince itself that the proving is the carefulness. The project manager who spends the bulk of their week producing evidence of good governance has, almost by definition, less time left to do the harder, less visible work that good governance was supposed to protect in the first place.
This is not an argument against reporting. Power wasn’t an anarchist about audit; he thought some of it was genuinely necessary. His point was narrower and, I think, more useful: audit becomes dangerous not when it exists, but when it becomes an end in itself, mistaken for the thing it was meant to verify. The test for whether that’s happened in your own organisation is uncomfortably simple. When was the last time a status report changed a decision, rather than simply documenting one that had already been made elsewhere, for other reasons, by people who weren’t really consulting the report at all?
If you can’t answer that quickly, you’re not running project governance anymore. You’re running a ritual of verification, performed correctly, by people who’ve forgotten, or never knew, what it was originally meant to protect.
References
Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford University Press.
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