From Blockchain to the Boardroom: Decentralised Governance is Inclusion by Design!

Knowing Self-Aware Leadership

Hello KSKOers

The more I’ve read about ‘decentralised governance’, the more I’ve found myself drawing parallels with the idea of ‘inclusive decision making’, which was something that came through in my research, as a mitigator against strategic level disconnect. They might sound like they belong in different worlds, one in the realm of blockchain and the other in the boardroom, but at their core, they’re both about the same thing: trust, inclusion and the courage to share power. This week’s blog is about how decentralised governance centralises communities and has inclusion built in by design.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

A few weeks ago, I was tagged into a vacancy by the very wonderful Sarah Bryer and I spent the afternoon learning about the organisation and a world I’d only had a glimpse into. Before then, I knew what bitcoin was. I had a basic understanding of what blockchain was. I’d heard the name Cardano Community. But now I know a little bit more about them all. And I know about ADA and Intersect MBO.

So what exactly am I talking about? Well…

🟡 Cardano is a blockchain platform that lets people build systems to send money, share data, and run apps without needing traditional financial institutions or intermediaries.
🟡 Blockchain is a network of computers around the world that work together to store information safely, recording every iteration with a code, instead of relying on one central memory…. like a server in the storage cupboard near the fire exit… IYKYK.
🟡 ADA is the digital currency used on the Cardano network to send ‘money’ and participate in decision-making, named so after Ada Lovelace.
🟡 Intersect MBO is a member-driven organisation at the heart of the Cardano ecosystem, placing the community at the center of ongoing operation and innovation through managing the decentralised governance of the community and decision making.

I feel like I’ve had the door opened to a whole new floor in the library that I didn’t know existed! Since discovering all of these things, I’ve become fascinated by this idea of decentralised governance.

Now, I’ve always had an interest in governance. Did I tell you that I did my doctorate by accident following an application to do a certificate in governance? I had been wanting to do my doctorate at the University of South Wales for EVER. But, the cost was astronomical, so I had a look around to see what other learning opportunities there were. UoSW was offering a certificate in governance course, so I duly put in my application. I had a reply to say that the course wasn’t going ahead this year due to a lack of interest, but they could offer me a masters instead. At the time I already had my masters so I replied saying, ‘no thanks, but I’ll do your doctorate’. They responded and said there was a new course director who’d reviewed the fee structure, and it turned out it was now affordable. Two weeks later I was starting my doctorate – all because I applied to do a certificate in governance!

Anyway, I digress.

What is corporate governance? Well, corporate governance is defined by the Chartered Governance Institute in this way:

Governance is the framework by which organisations are directed and controlled. It identifies who can make decisions, who has the authority to act on behalf of the organisation and who is accountable for how an organisation and its people behave and perform.¹

Decentralised governance, on the other hand, is what the framework by which the Cardano Community is operated, is called. What is the difference between corporate governance and decentralised governance, I hear you say? Well, decentralised governance is about how you take control away from organisations and give that autonomy back to the people. It feels a bit like democracy. But more than democracy, it’s a model of inclusion by design, embedding fairness, transparency, and participation into the very architecture of how things work. The whole community and way of decision making embodies the idea of inclusion by design and ensure that the ability to participate isn’t an afterthought, but it’s built into how the system operates from the start.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) describes decentralisation like this:

It refers to the transfer of powers, responsibilities, and resources from the central government to elected authorities at the subnational level, with some degree of autonomy. Decentralisation covers three distinct but interrelated dimensions: political, administrative, and fiscal decentralisation.²

Why is all of this of interest to a blog that talks about self-aware leadership? Well, it’s that connection between decentralised governance and inclusive decision making. Both are practical examples of inclusion by design, where participation is a core design principle.

Here’s an extract from my book, The Self-Awareness Superhighway, which talks about it:

In the social care sector, people talk a lot about moving away from ‘doing unto’ to ‘doing with’. There’s a very strong movement away from doing things to service users and to doing things with service users. This is a major cultural shift, when for so long the mantra has been, people don’t know what they need and people don’t know what’s good for them. There’s been a stark realisation since the mid-noughties that, regardless of what people think others need, if they don’t want it, they won’t engage. If you think someone needs to learn to read and you put on adult literacy classes and no one comes because they want to learn to sing or play football, then maybe you need to rethink adult literacy in terms of song lyrics and football rules.

It’s the same in business. If you’ve decided that what your clinical team needs is an extra evening cardiology clinic to get through their waiting list but you haven’t asked whether anyone’s available to work those hours, then what you’ve got is strategic-level disconnect. And what you need is inclusive decision making.

A major roadblock to effective self-aware leadership, which you’ll read more about in the next chapter, is strategic-level disconnect. It’s that lack of connection between the people at the strategic level of the organisation making the decisions and those people at the operational end who are tasked with implementing them. An enabler for this is inclusive decision making. Inclusive decision making bridges the gap of detachment between the strategic and operational functions within organisations.

There is a link between detachment, emotions and decision making because feelings are linked to the way people make decisions, think and behave.⁴ Relations-orientated leadership involves behaviour that explicitly includes subordinates in decision making.⁵ In the discussion about resilience and wellbeing leadership, inclusive decision making is referenced in the definition. Including people in decision making is a mitigator against strategic-level disconnect, and it impacts people’s emotional attachment, feelings of purpose, contribution, acknowledgement and, ultimately, happiness in the workplace.

Alison Lagier (episode 7) said that because feedback is filtered at the strategic level, people operating at that level need to actively seek out input from others. Without that input, it might mean they can’t achieve their goal, and their plans end up being simply underivable. Alison’s advice? Take people with you on your journey. A project might be longer in the planning, but delivery is going to be more attainable. Because you’ve put the effort up front in the planning, the delivery part of the process will be shorter, smoother and more likely to end up with a positive outcome. If you don’t, the planning may be far shorter, but the delivery’s going to be fraught with problems and obstacles and you’ll have lots of unhappy people challenging you when you think you’re near the finishing line. Front load your time and weight your engagement to planning rather than rectification. Your pocket will probably be better off too.

Organisations need to consider innovative methods to ensure inclusive decision making isn’t tokenistic and is really valued. You need to think more about co-production as the way you do things, which is a level of commitment and resource allocation significantly greater than the predominantly consultative way organisations usually involve people in decision making. Organisations are forever distributing surveys that ask questions like “We’re going to be closing down our second office.

Are you okay with that?” and feeding back that there weren’t enough responses to make the ‘nopes’ statistically significant and, therefore, they’re ploughing ahead as proposed. They then have to deal with those unhappy people waving placards two feet from the finish line.

Liam Maguire (episode 19) said the best leaders push authority and information down through organisations to allow other people to make decisions. Organisations that retain decision making at the top are missing opportunities to innovate and make the best decisions for the customer, patient or service user. Mission command, the military approach to decision making, empowers people at all levels to make the right decision in the right place at the right time. This resonates with our earlier exploration into organisations that continue to operate in the ‘pyramid shape’ of the industrial paradigm versus those that are moving to a more fluid and adaptable structure in response to changing demands of knowledge-based work.

The connection between decentralised governance and inclusive decision making is clear. Inclusive decision making often stops at consultation, but decentralised governance takes it a step further. It builds inclusion into the system itself. It’s not something you do after decisions are made; it’s how decisions happen in the first place. Decentralised governance is what inclusive decision making looks like when it’s written into the way things work. In other words, it’s inclusion by design: participation coded into the DNA of the process.

Essentially, inclusive decision making is decentralised governance in miniature, and decentralised governance is inclusive decision making at scale. Both are underpinned by inclusion by design - systems that democratise not just the outcome, but the process itself.

Self-aware leadership is about knowing when to hold control and when to share it. Decentralised systems work in the same way. They rely on trust, feedback and transparency to make better decisions together. In a way, decentralised systems do at scale what self-aware leaders do individually. Both operate through intentional structures that balance self-awareness with shared authority. Co-production and consensus both slow things down at the start so that things can move more smoothly later on. They both recognise that if you bring people into the process early, you’re far more likely to get it right first time. Inclusion up front saves time, money and heartache later.

Inclusive decision making also helps bridge that emotional gap between those who make decisions and those who deliver them. Decentralised governance does something similar by sharing power, trust and information across a whole community. It’s not just technical, it’s emotional. It builds belonging by giving everyone a stake.It recognises that emotional inclusion is as vital as structural inclusion.

The Last Word

What strikes me most is that these ideas, though they come from very different spaces, are really about the same human instinct; that need to belong, to contribute and to be trusted. Whether it’s a blockchain community, a social care organisation or a leadership team, the principle is the same: people make better decisions when they make them together. That’s what inclusion by design ultimately means: creating environments where inclusion isn’t dependent on goodwill or leadership style, but on the way things are built.

Maybe that’s what this whole journey into governance, in all its forms, is teaching me, that inclusion isn’t just a process, it’s both a philosophy and a framework; it’s how we make inclusion inevitable.

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Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as a strategy and operations leader.

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1. https://www.cgi.org.uk/resources/factsheets/factsheets/what-is-governance/

2. https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/decentralisation.html