We Couldn't Keep Up. That's Changing.

Business velocity has been steadily increasing for years. Better communication tools, faster development cycles, more connected systems. Every wave of technology made it possible to move faster.

And every wave, governance fell further behind.

Not because governance didn’t matter. Because the tools and the cognitive bandwidth and the process rigor required to govern effectively couldn’t keep pace with the speed of business. We needed to go faster, but our ability to manage risk, maintain architectural oversight, and enforce standards couldn’t match that pace.

So governance trailed. Risk management was reactive at best, muddled in bureaucracy at worst. Architecture became shelfware — documentation that was outdated before it was finished, created because someone said it was required, read by almost no one.

Here’s what I think is about to change: the same agentic capabilities that are accelerating business are also capable of accelerating governance. Continuous compliance checking instead of quarterly audits. Real-time risk assessment instead of after-the-fact reviews. Architecture documentation that maintains itself.

That’s the opportunity. But it’s not automatic. If we just accelerate business and leave governance behind — again — we’re going to have the same problem at 10x the speed. And the consequences of that gap at agentic velocity are going to be much more severe than anything we’ve dealt with before.

We couldn’t keep up. Now we can. The question is whether we will.