- Wed, 10 June 2026
“I love working here, but I’m struggling to get things done.” People often know what needs to be done but are paralysed into inaction; they don’t have the authority, or obtaining permission is slow and painful.
You and your team have just finished a workshop. The energy was amazing, and you have identified a market gap your product could address. But now, as you talk through how to get started, a colleague reminds you that you will need to obtain budgetary approval and have it reviewed and signed off by security and legal before taking it to the governance board. Your heart sinks. Work doesn’t slow down because people don’t know what to do. It slows down because they’re not allowed to do it.
The world is accelerating; the pressure to move fast is immense, and decisions are now needed faster than ever as AI accelerates insight and execution. But organisations are still structured for control, not for speed and experimentation; this is an emerging tension. We can act faster than ever, but our organisations won’t let us.
A prevailing mindset is: “What if something goes wrong?” This is only natural, because things will go wrong. But most aren’t catastrophic, yet we treat them as if they are. Each failure adds more controls, more process, more friction. Over time, the organisation slows to a crawl.
There is a demand to stay safe and, therefore, introduce even tighter controls in the face of an ever more uncertain world. However, for most problems we face, we need adaptability even over control.
To build adaptable organisations, we need to redefine governance. One client I worked with put it like this, “We need some bureaucracy, but it should be a minimal viable bureaucracy”, just enough to stay safe, but flexible enough to move fast. In adaptable organisations, control comes from fast feedback loops that allow us to adapt, rather than trying to prevent everything.
Governance is needed to provide the structures and guardrails that clarify who gets to decide. Teams need to understand where the boundaries of their decision-making lie. The real problem isn’t just authority. It’s clarity. Teams don’t need unlimited freedom. They need to understand which decisions they can make for themselves.
Control through approval to control through feedback
Decisions at the top to decisions at the edge
Prevent mistakes to learn fast and adapt
Work with teams to craft their goals, agree on how to measure success, give them the authority to decide how to achieve those goals, and hold them accountable. Make sure it is clear which decisions they get to make. Get control by helping them establish fast feedback loops and ensuring they regularly review results. The picture won’t be perfect, but celebrate the journey rather than criticising the imperfections, and give them the courage to adapt as they learn.
When you do this, some of their decisions will be great, better than you could have made, because they are the experts closest to the situation. But not everything will go well; old habits will creep in. When pressure mounts, managers will try to override teams’ decisions; fear and blame may surface, and people will hesitate to make decisions. This is where you, as a leader, become the team’s biggest supporter, reinforce their goals, and protect their autonomy. Make sure they have the coaching support to learn and adapt.
When teams make decisions relevant to their roles and expertise, you foster autonomy, enhance responsiveness, and encourage innovative problem-solving. Decentralised decision-making is about distributing authority throughout the system rather than concentrating it at the top of the organisation.
Establish clear agreements on who makes decisions, thereby clarifying the decision rights held by teams and roles. In these agreements, distribute decision-making authority to those closest to the work or the problem, enabling quicker, more contextually relevant decisions. Then train and support people to exercise their new authority.
Governance only becomes real when it changes how decisions are made day to day. Here is just a flavour of some enabling patterns that might allow your organisation to start decentralising decision-making and to go fast with control.
This approach promotes inclusive, consent-based decision-making by integrating input from all members. Consent differs from consensus. Consensus aims to have everyone fully behind a decision, which can lead to watering down ideas to make them palatable. Consent is achieved as long as no one can object, because they know the idea will cause harm or may cause harm before the organisation can reasonably respond. Consent focuses on what’s acceptable, not what everyone prefers. Consent doesn’t ask, “Do we all agree?” It asks, “Is this safe enough to try?”
In this pattern, anyone can make a decision, but they must seek advice from all affected parties and those with expertise on the matter. The decision-maker considers the advice but is not bound by it.
When people ask “what should I do?”, step into a coaching stance and ask “what do you think you should do?”
Encourage teams to make decisions autonomously while ensuring those decisions do not harm the organisation. The waterline metaphor likens decisions to a ship: those above the waterline (low risk) can be made without extensive consultation. At the same time, those below require broader agreement and maybe a different decision-making framework, as they could sink the ship. For decisions above the waterline, the advice process is great. This approach balances autonomy with safety, ensuring critical organisational thresholds are respected.
Make decisions in the open, and create transparency for all members of the organisation impacted by the decision. The goal here is to build trust and clarify the purpose of the decision so everyone can act on it effectively.
Minority voices can offer essential insights that are important for making better decisions, especially those below the waterline. Design your decision-making process to value every member’s input, using it to improve ideas and proposals. It goes beyond majority rule, ensuring all perspectives, especially dissenting ones, are considered seriously in the decision-making process. This pattern fosters deeper engagement and consensus, enhancing decision quality and organisational cohesion.
Different decisions require different approaches to decision-making. If the building is on fire, an autocratic decision-making style is appropriate; you want somebody to make a decision and shout “everybody out”. If you absolutely want everybody to buy into an idea, then taking the time to reach consensus might be appropriate. But as you experiment with decision-making, ask yourself what types of decisions would be better served through consent or the advice process.
When a team makes a decision that turns out to be a bad one, and a stakeholder escalates an issue. Suddenly, the question isn’t how do we deliver value at speed? It’s how do we get control back?
This is the moment that determines whether autonomy was ever real. If every mistake leads to taking power away, no one will ever take responsibility.
When organisations start to push decision-making to the edge, something shifts.
This isn’t just theory. Research shows that decentralised decision-making leads to quicker decisions and greater responsiveness because teams closest to the work can sense and act on opportunities more quickly.
And in today’s world, this matters more than ever. AI is giving organisations unprecedented access to insight, patterns, signals, opportunities, all visible faster than ever before. But insight without authority is useless.
Insight + authority = advantage.
If your teams can see what’s happening, but still need to wait for permission to act, you will struggle to get things done.
Adapting how governance is done is where many organisations go wrong. They see the benefits of autonomy and assume the answer is to remove control altogether. It isn’t. You don’t remove control. You redesign it. Effective governance is not about approvals. It’s about clarity on who makes which decisions and how.
The patterns help build the structures for effective decision-making. The waterline creates safety without friction. The advice process fosters real ownership and accelerates decision-making. The consent process and deep democracy help us gather the wisdom for our people to improve decisions rather than watering them down. Transparency builds trust at scale.
Control is important. But in adaptable organisations, control doesn’t come from centralised decision-making; it comes from visibility, feedback, and learning, which allows people to act.
At some point, something bigger changes. People stop asking for permission, not because they’ve become reckless. But because they understand the intent, the boundaries, and the responsibility.
Decisions no longer queue at the top of the organisation waiting for approval. They happen where the information is freshest, and the context is richest. And the organisation starts to move differently. Faster. Smarter. More alive. This is what modern adaptable and resilient organisations require.
You don’t need another transformation to start. You just need to change where decisions are made.
Then take a step. Start small with one or a few teams:
And most importantly:
When something goes wrong, don’t take the power back. Help people learn. Because in a world that moves faster every day, the organisations that win won’t be the ones with the most control. They’ll be the ones who trust their people to act, and design their organisations so they can.
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