From centralised management to distributed cooperation

What centralised management offers

A centre helps set strategic direction, coordinate action and make clear decisions. Its strengths include coherence, unified oversight, defined authority and managerial responsibility, and the ability to concentrate resources.

It can also create bottlenecks, overload the centre and produce excessive dependence on managers. Employees’ local knowledge may be underused. An employee may know the assigned task without understanding how their work contributes to the organisation’s overall goal.

Strengths and risks of distributed cooperation

Decisions closer to those doing the work can make better use of context, initiative, creativity and personal responsibility. Participants may respond faster to change and propose solutions informed by local knowledge.

Distributing decisions also creates risks:

• Local optimisation and personal interests may displace the shared result.
• Different participants’ decisions may conflict.
• Responsibility may become unclear.
• The organisation may lose its strategic direction.

Decentralisation is therefore not a goal in itself.

ObliNet’s task: combine the strengths

ObliNet does not require abandoning hierarchy. It investigates a mechanism in which participants make decisions within their authority while maintaining coordination, responsibility and a connection to the shared goal.

Management retains its strategic role and authority. Rules need to specify which decisions a participant may make, where coordination is required, who provides resources and who is responsible for results. Management and supporting services should also have verifiable commitments.

Understand the goal — and want to achieve it

Transferring authority is not enough. Employees need not only to know the strategic goal, but to understand its meaning, see how their work contributes and want to help achieve it.

The mechanism proposed for investigation is employees’ participation in forming, discussing and voluntarily accepting commitments. An employee considers the goal, explains capabilities and constraints, discusses interdependencies and knowingly accepts a defined commitment. This may support deeper involvement than following instructions alone.

Participation in discussion does not guarantee identification with the goal. Research needs to examine working conditions, the distribution of benefits, trust and authority. Terms need not benefit everyone equally, but must be explicitly agreed by the relevant parties; formal agreement must not replace the right to refuse.

A commitment network connects decisions to results

ObliNet proposes making connections between participants’ actions explicit and testable. To the extent needed for their role, a participant should be able to see:

• The shared result the parties seek.
• How their commitment contributes to it.
• Whom and what they depend on.
• Who depends on their work.
• Which changes require renewed coordination.

AI can help identify conflicts and suggest alternatives. Decisions, consent, authority, responsibility and acceptance of results remain with people.

From instructions to agreed commitments

The transition under investigation is from an employee mainly receiving tasks to participating in clarification of the conditions needed for a shared result and accepting responsibility for defined commitments.

Coordination rests on a network of agreed commitments, while management retains its strategic role. New circumstances require reassessing dependencies and having affected, authorised people approve changes. Fulfilling every individual commitment still does not guarantee the shared goal: the overall result also needs checking.

The hypothesis to test

Can employees who help form commitments, understand their interdependencies and see the connection to the strategic goal achieve better results? Can this improve both results and the organisation’s ability to learn and change its rules?

These are research questions, not proven achievements. Comparative experiments need comparable tasks and resources, criteria set in advance, and full accounting for discussion, coordination and checking time. Research must establish when formalisation is worthwhile and when its cost exceeds its benefit.

The proposed mechanism, existing website prototypes and verified results are distinct. A demonstration or simulator does not establish effectiveness in a real organisation; this article presents no new empirical results.