Decomposition-Induced Governance Blindness: Assurance continuity across decomposed governance systems

Abstract

Complex organisations become governable by decomposition. Responsibilities are distributed among specialist functions, committees, professions, programmes and assurance regimes so that bounded attention and expertise can be applied to manageable parts of a larger system. Yet consequential relationships do not necessarily share those jurisdictional boundaries. A proposition about service recoverability, digital benefit, transformation resilience or organisational performance may depend on conditions governed by several domains even when every domain performs its local role competently. This paper develops Decomposition-Induced Governance Blindness (DIGB) as a candidate construct for the resulting loss of assurance continuity. DIGB is defined as the loss or degradation of current whole-system assurance over consequential relationships, dependencies or propositions that cross the jurisdictions into which governance has been decomposed. It is theorised to arise where such crossings lack mechanisms that preserve their visibility, ownership and validity across domains and over time. The paper introduces the Cross-Domain Governance Object (CDGO) as the principal unit of analysis: a consequential relationship, proposition, dependency or state whose validity depends on conditions governed across two or more domains, so that its assurance may not follow from assurance of its constituent components. Governance Architecture Misalignment (GAM) is specified as an antecedent, and compensating mechanisms are modelled separately as suppressors. DIGB is observed through outcomes coded independently of those mechanisms: detection latency, persistence of unsupported propositions, and consequential decisions made while such propositions are relied upon. Visibility loss, ownership discontinuity and assurance discontinuity are treated as candidate explanatory processes. The paper distinguishes DIGB from near-decomposability, interdependence, mirroring, coordination neglect, structural secrecy, incubation and drift, silos, boundary spanning, structural holes, the problem of many hands, systems safety, high-reliability organising, combined and dynamic assurance, business continuity and operational resilience. A structured comparison with these rivals, summarised in Table 1, finds that each explains part of the phenomenon. Dynamic assurance cases maintain such propositions where they have been constituted as assurance objects; DIGB concerns consequential cross-domain propositions that lack that coverage and explains why decomposed governance leaves them uncovered. Five falsifiable propositions are advanced. The central theoretical claim is that whole-system assurance depends not only on assurance quality within domains but on whether consequential relationships crossing those domains are themselves objects of continuing assurance. Four independently developed methods — Structural Decision Intelligence, the Digital Transformation Resilience Model, a business-continuity and operational-resilience application of DTRM, and a Digital Value Realisation Framework — are used as theory-motivating material rather than validation. Their recurrence motivates a spatial and temporal account of governance blindness: an organisation can retain competent local governance, adequate information, clear functional accountability and historically valid assurance while losing current assurance of the whole-system proposition. A staged empirical programme is specified to test whether DIGB adds explanatory and detection value beyond established theories. Keywords: governance; assurance continuity; decomposition; interdependence; cross-domain governance object; organisation design; operational resilience; business continuity; digital transformation; systems thinking AI disclosure: generative AI (Claude, Anthropic) was used to support review, reference verification, copy-editing and formatting.