How Blockchain Will Change Organisation Design
Organisations adopting blockchain technologies can be viewed as Human-Machine Networks (HMNs), where combinations of humans and machines interact with each other. The more an organisation moves towards a ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation’ (DAO) design, the more efficient and autonomous it will become. Ultimately, organisations can operate completely independently using a distributed ledger technology, a combination of smart contracts, connected devices, analytics and of course data.
Within such futuristic organisation, interactions between stakeholders will be guided purely by autonomous software. A DAO is run by immutable code under the sole control of a set of irreversible business rules. As such, a DAO will have different actors from today’s organisations. It will create a fundamentally new organisational structure. After all, a DAO is a self-organising framework that uses automated decision-making based on consensus in which actors interact with each other without the need to trust each other.
A Change in Power and Data Governance
As a result, within a DAO there is no traditional organisational hierarchy since hierarchy is determined by ownership (i.e. how trusted an actor is as well as the merits earned by that actor as a result of behaviour). This change in organisational…
