First principles for DAO design

Transcript

all right great thank you so much for coming around thanks for the queue uh and yeah also very delightful to see some familiar faces in the next 15 minutes and i hope i get to 15 minutes i'll try to give you an introduction of design of organizations this might be interesting for those of you who either are starting an organization already are participating on one or have started a company to improve theirs but also for contributors because in the in essence even if you contribute to an organization you're in some ways also co-designing it through you know like governance mechanisms before i go into detail i want to also emphasize and kind of thank everybody who's participated in the organization deep work so far it's built over the last four years and

it's only people who want it and who are interested in doing the work that they're doing nobody they have no obligation to work there and yet over the last four years they've built over 40 different projects some of you or well yeah some of you will recognize many of the projects how many of you are either business owners or freelancers just like to get an idea okay cool i'm asking because i also um this is interesting because i also kind of observing the trend of people slowly transitioning more and more into like self-owned work or like freelance um kind of infrastructure i think people are looking for more meaning outside of the kind of enclosed working

environments and i think they're right most of the reasons for that are probably rooted in the way that people actually perceive work so this is just a quick um historical background organizational work in itself has been going through a transition of how people understood it so before the middle ages it was just considered a part of life like you sleep you eat you work that's that's fine now it's more something like a disutility and it went through the middle ages christian chauvinist decided that doing good work hard work makes you a good person because you're earning profits because the prophets go to the church church distributes it across the poor god thinks that's a cool thing so that's why you are now part of us part of society if you do hard work the same mental

model is a transition to the industrialization except now it's the factory owners who decide on how to distribute the profits but the idea of hard work being still part of being a good person regardless of whether you like it or not has persisted so far and the reason why i'm kind of explaining this or mentioning that is because i think that we shouldn't design or we can't and we shouldn't approach design of organizations with that perspective of work being a disability or something that people don't like because we want them to participate in organizations we want them to find meaning in what they're working on and people i mean people or us we all like participating to things that we

enjoy and find collaboration and find fair compensation for so i think the kind of core premise um should be different where we focus on kind of what's the um important things that are meaningful to us and it's a very messy way messy path um that's normal those of you who have businesses or freelancers know that you have to go through a lot of chaos until you actually converge into something that is meaningful um there's essentially i would say three things that help with that which is um you gain confidence in your personal abilities so you're kind of observing like what problem are you solving and you're trying to figure out what's like this define your personal abilities to do the work um you want to

you want to uh specialize in that as much as possible and you want to projectize in order to communicate that to your environment as much as possible and then these things you kind of bounce off your environment which is your stakeholders clients or friends and through that communication you're kind of defining the the meaning of your work over time and um what's important about this and what i kind of see also working with a lot of teams on design is that a lot of them are trying to kind of uh outsource a lot of the ideas a lot of the work but i think that um i or i encourage people to kind of drive back to the core of like what are you good at and stay with that because that also helps

um attacking a much greater environment if you then have multiple people working on the same uh problem area and and like the the environment or like the yeah the environment of your value expands from that um and it's also an opportunity for us as organizational designers to actually create the environments that are favorable for people so making sure that individuals can like what we do as you know as self-sufficient people like eat sleep and eat well sleep exercise we can build the environments that also facilitate these things because then they also become points of attractors for people to come in and start contributing which is also important because now you

want to also kind of be transparent about these things so if you want to kind of design organization and attract people i think transparency is one of the also key areas to to touch on because um that's what that's the only thing that's really relevant for people if they want to know what's going on so they need to know what work is being done and who is doing what and so you don't need like entertainment or memes or anything to attract people you just need to communicate these things as long as they're favorable people will just flock towards and then it kind of will mimic things like dynamics like from online forums like reddit where people just like come because it's interesting they do the work they leave if they don't want to or they stick around because

they think it's nice i also think that being very transparent about financial data is a useful thing although with a caveat because the transparency is kind of a spectrum so i would lean towards the full transparency but keep in mind that the individuals and the workers are still the ones to decide how to deal with that transparency how to deal with that data so what they want to share um as part of their personal reputation so you can't be transparent about the work but then also like some people might not want to identify themselves with certain organizations a certain work um it's a more complicated topic i'm happy to talk about separately but this is uh just to keep in mind if you

want to be transparent about organizational design so in terms of organizations in general i think the mental model is also something again as a combination of the permissionlessness of online forums and by the way i don't also kind of don't think that dao's as we by textbook definition really exist yet um also following up with a talk before me um but also um but i think that we're getting there if we if we can follow the the right kind of principle so on one side i think it's kind of mimicking the permissionlessness of online forums and communities like like reddit but on the other side we want a combination with a sustainable business model and kind of the merge of

that is something that i would say that replicates the ideas of what we see in in dao's there's also excellent research done by my friends from block science kelsey and evan and michael zargham on the viable system model which i also can recommend kind of going deeper into but it's like very uh very tech kind of a very technical model of how an organization can also kind of fractalize so from going to design um there's actually only one principle that i would recommend sticking to or like if there's one thing to remember from from this then this is probably uh well all of them are important but this is very designy so whether you're

designing a product or or an organization you basically want to look at what people observe or people are already doing like the their behaviors in the organization and then um help them do more of the things that you think are beneficial for for the whole and then you're automating the thing the the way that you help them do more of that so essentially kind of looking at what's going on anyway and then you're building constraints so they do more of the things that are good for the whole and less of the things that are not good for the whole so these little pink dots that are like people and the blue text is like behaviors at least with like my organization or not mine but the one that i designed um and it's also similar with like any

product so um this is just an example from the east launch pad you have the same kind of dynamics you first look at what people are doing anyway and then you design any constraints and you merge what what's good for the collective with um what people already are doing because that are going to be the things that are also meaningful activities and people will consider to be meaningful work okay um another thing i just need to drink sorry this is probably the most important thing but also the most complicated so it might sound a bit um uh a bit uh simple to say but i think if you want to go and design organizations that are

organic and adaptable to their environment we need some model of how to kind of organize so that we have the awareness of what's going on outside and so the my personal approach is basically transitioning as much as possible from purely work stream based work to project-based work as much as possible with the idea with the intention to have recurring projects so that you define very specifically what you're working on so um the process of like what exactly needs to be done the duration how long a project is taking and the outcome and then obviously you can attach the cost and the profit margin and that's going to be your price that you can also check

back with a stakeholder or client but that basically allows you to first of all communicate what's going on really clearly but also to over time have these kind of recurring check-ins almost like being more mindful in what your work consists of on a long-term basis so finishing a project then having a retrospective finishing another project and even if the even if the project is on average like pretty much the same that will make sure that everybody constantly keeps learning and everybody keeps being aware of what's going on outside it also has a lot of side effects like people have more ability to negotiate their compensation every single time or they start building they start focusing on interpersonal

relationships because they know that by any type of project any project they can basically be left out of the organization so try to focus on making their relationships a lot more sustainable and it also decentralizes kind of risk because if there's no work in the organization then nobody needs to sit around and do nothing because you're able to just say okay well here's the project and if there's no project people just don't participate because they're freelances and that incentivizes them to look for other places of work for example or just do other things and spend their time in a more meaningful way and of course yeah what a project is defined by can be very different so everyone has a different perspective so this is probably like the

last part that i want to touch on which is um soft governance over algorithmic governance or token-based governance um governance essentially is just like making decisions together and it's been around for a long time so it's not necessarily connected to just tokens but i think design thinking is a really good tool to align people on exactly what are the specifics of a project or specifics of certain decisions especially if it's in a conversation because if you drive that out into like a more broader token based system like on snapshot or something then you'll always have an amount of people that will disagree with the decision eventually um so yeah i can recommend looking into design

thinking practices or like using miro for for these things it's post-its it's very handy google has a project called google aristotle that i also recommend looking into basically spent three four years researching the best team possible and so all of that doesn't really require any web 3 based tools at all so i know this is a crypto conference but um none of these things are really like super novel there's a it's just a combination of things that we that that help shape and shift uh and and see work from a bit of a different perspective but also with tools that already exist so you can use typeform and zapier for an interface that's connected to data that can connect to anything like a lot

of different platforms if you want to track reputation discord has the roles i use them to just basically say like if someone completes a project that's their badge now or like their role because they have been completing the same project for a very long time and you can let them attest them anyway documentation of work also um the speaker before me was mentioning how important documentation is specify exactly what needs to be worked on and who is working on what what needs to be worked on git book is great google sheets is for financial data who's working on what you can also go through asana or notion all of these let you have a public view that's also visible to anyone and anyone can kind of look in and then see oh this might be something for me and then people come in and

write you a message hey can i contribute to that project and then you see if they're if you want to work with them sobel is a great tool also a little bit of a different perspective it just shows uh the actual roles so that people can find who is working on what um it also has a discord integration so if you have the discord roles that specify the uh the tasks or the projects then you can kind of tag them here and dynamically make it visible so um yeah and i'm also building or like i built an mvp that kind of summarizes all of these principles although that is more uh first of all it's just an mvp but also it's more focused on existing businesses that have a profitable model

already and then also employ only freelancers so i don't know how much that applies to you but you can still check it out and give me feedback if you think it's uh worth improving in any way um so yeah i i know this like i'm just barely scratching the surface of all these topics so talked about innovation as a process radical transparency design for emergence project-based work soft governance if you have any other questions or comments i'm happy to elaborate on all of these things i also have a twitter and an instagram you can add me there and send me a message i read through all the messages and i reply to all of the messages and yeah last but not least thank you so much for your interest in design [Applause]

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