Ultra-Light_Governance: The Ontological Foundations of Modern Organizations

Before we ask how an organization should be managed, we must first ask whether it exists as a governed entity at all. Across industries and institutions, governance is becoming heavier. Rules proliferate, oversight expands, and compliance costs rise, yet organizations remain fragile. Ultra-Light Governance argues that this heaviness is not a sign of maturity, but a symptom of absence. When governance fails to form as a fundamental condition of existence, management is forced to compensate through endless additive structures. In this seminal work, systems theorist Ng Tick Kee presents a rigorous ontological framework that separates governance from management, leadership, and compliance.
It posits that governance is a binary threshold phenomenon: an organization either possesses the structural capacity to bear consequence, or it does not.