Building Regenerative Culture

Transcript

it's okay okay okay i'm beth mccarthy from toucan protocol and um i'm speaking about building regenerative culture today um so to kind of start off with what i mean by that then i want to go into what uh i mean when speaking about a regenerative uh organization so um you know those of us in the refi space you know have had a lot of discourse going around about like you know what is regenerative about what we are doing you know is um some definitions being like specifically using uh decentralized finance

mechanisms for um climate impact or um you know public goods funding or kind of intentionally building into regenerative practices like um circular economics um but i am also super interested in this greater examination that comes from working in a regenerative space specifically about how we can make organizations that are nourishing for people and you know in this environment where we are continually having to um adapt you know to changes in regulation to changes in the market to you know dow drama that causes people to switch a lot between projects and

just you know a general uh attitude in the space about you know wanting to be fulfilled that often comes into conflict conflict with you know libertarian policies and kind of pervasive politics in the space i just i want to speak briefly about how i personally define our regenerative organization so number one one that's resilient and anti-fragile so you know attempt um intentionally thinking about how to um be sustainable over time so that would mean through different phases and cycles of

you know like different uh types of contributors coming in different market conditions you know decentralizing to adele um you know encountering any of these circumstances of change uh instead of um you know breaking uh as um it goes into a next season um intentionally building a resilient structure um also uh organization that is ethical so um having a really specific uh idea and you know that's discussed in an explicit manner that is set um you know with leadership team or with you know core contributors and also

input and you know as part of a discourse between other contributors and team members between um you know what actually matters you know to our organization like you know if we are trying to have like diversity in inclusion initiatives for example what does that actually mean not only in terms of hiring practices and percentages but also um how you know people are treated within the company both you know in uh internal slack messages but also in attitudes toward things like parental leave and um really explicitly defining these values and encoding them into the infrastructure of the org through policies standards and practices you

know that are actually lived and returned to and examined and uh that leads into this other aspect of being iterative so having a really rigorous self-examination of you know what is the cultural state of our organization are we intentionally setting culture and um then revising that as uh we scale as we're existing in different conditions and um you know having a really quantifiable and qualifiable process that's um you know able to be revisited over time able able to scale and um

like um accessible to like you know other people who are in the organization or in the ecosystem so that this um yeah so that the ethical can be explicit and like um expanded upon so um regenerative organizations bring this feedback loop of um self-awareness across these multiple dimensions so uh cultural technical ecological economic um i'm sure there's many others but these are the ones that i've been interested in recently um and um specifically thinking about this functioning system so you know the both the team that you're

in and also the greater system of builders because you know as we can all see you know seeing all of our friends out in the hallways seeing projects that you know have these composable pieces that tie into each other we are all super interconnected in the space and a lack of meeting any of you know these ethical iterative sustainable dimensions and ends up reverberating out through the rest of the system that we are operating in and i think it's really useful to characterize gaps or blockages or you know unacknowledged patterns and anti-patterns within the system as uh debt so time and resources borrowed from

the system you know to continue pushing it forward but in you know a way that is not necessarily examined or uh being rigorously measured and revisited so um specifically with this concept of technical debt that i'm sure um you know most people here are familiar with um so i really like this concept um so a quote from the guy who came up with the concept you know you can make these sacrifices of like you know not doing code documentation doing things sloppily and not explaining to others why that happened um a tweet that i thought was really valuable and was going to include in this uh and forgot until now was um

that said like uh yeah the hardest thing about working on a technical team is not necessarily the actual technical challenges but understanding why we did this who decided to do that so you can ask them and then that person is no longer there or you know on holiday all the time because they were one of the oj people that came up with it and um you know this lack of thinking about um how choices that are made you know will impact stuff down the line and having documentation and also having communication you know with others who are impacted by it um you know would be characterized as technical debt so then this other guy martin fowler made a really cool uh diagram for this so thinking in this

context um you know some debt uh is incurred through like deliberate choices some through inadvertent or accidental choices and you know some of those might be reckless and some you know would be you know people are really trying to do the right thing and proceed prudently but it still ends up having a negative impact um so you know just to conceptualize these so you know deliberate and reckless we don't have time for design a major one that i have personally witnessed in my like many years working with emerging startups being like you know we don't have time to make a design system we don't have time to you know have clear communication pathways between design and marketing and product we aren't

going to do user research research because we need to push this forward so you know a deliberate and reckless choice another one being you know just people not um you know having time to all learn and be educated about what their tech stack is like you know deliberate and prudent um you know having to make the choice between going ahead and shipping and uh something still being a mess and being like we'll come back and fix that later and you know inadvertent and prudent like you know uh what is it called afterthought being a 2020 like you know realizing okay we made this mistake and really the only way for us to have understood that that was a mistake and the parameters of that mistake was to make

it uh you know and so then you can do with that choice what you will so i think it's really useful to take this concept of technical debt and um uh extrapolate it to uh thinking about culture so you know by culture i mean uh team culture within uh a dour project but also um you know cultural choices that impact everyone in your community or ecosystem okay cool so you know examples that we all have experienced um you know trying out or transitioning to a new structure like a dow without thinking through the consequences so you know it was interesting yesterday and one of the talks i was hearing you know uh some

people who were deeply involved with kind of getting d dals off the ground being like now this is running away with us you know there's messy product decisions there's like poor um decision making structures and you know as with um this bottom right light bottom uh yeah bottom left i'm kind of dyslexic this quadrant um then uh yeah they um you know just not realizing these things are problems until later and also you know some of these things though can be nipped in the bud in terms of like you know if your team or project is lacking self-awareness about issues such as lack of diversity unclear communication um

you know distrust within teams and still choosing not to acknowledge that or not to you know undergo conflict resolution practices or to think intentionally about that you know these anti-patterns you know then become what your culture is and your culture is one where um you know things are happening like um you know autonomy bottlenecks because it has not quite been thought through you know what is the decision-making structure how does that impact people in different teams so you know as you can see i really like this quadrant and think that it's super useful to think about these parameters of cultural debt so um you know just to run these quickly and i

wish that um i was better at perceiving time because i was hoping to ask if anyone else had any other examples but i am about to end i think um but you know please you know mention in the question section if you have other thoughts that fit in here because i think they're um you know some of these like you know it seems like it would be positive um on its face especially some of these inadvertent ones that happen such as like you know we're all suffering from this uh endemic burnout throughout our our system but then you know people constantly putting in work you know ends up being praised because people are doing incredible stuff and like you know there needs to be an understanding you know that this is part of a debt

structure you know taking from people's potential future time and ability by getting so burnt out similarly you know exploring flat hierarchies and decentralized organizations and going through those pain points but then you know having it be like well i don't know who set the budget i don't know who to ask about this and people you know not wanting to claim authority because you know we're trying to be flat and decentralized but then you know there ends up being a lack of autonomy because there's no one just signing off on that decision and then you know i would say a deliberate one could be an example of you know projects that very intentionally adopt a hard libertarian stance and you know don't want to have a nourishing or

regenerative culture because that's you know what suits their uh way of operating but um you know obviously that's creating cultural debt and that's you know a very intentional choice and similarly with uh deliberate and prudent a lot of times you know discussions i'll close in like one second yeah you know discussions we end up happening in the dallas space where it's like you know i love working in that space but you know i have to be a contractor to work with adele so i can't get sponsored for a visa or i can't have health insurance or i can't have parental leave and i want to start a family and like you know i think we lose a lot of talent by people having to weigh um you know the policies that are very intentionally chosen for good reasons by

dowse around liability and around uh you know this decentralized ethos yet it ends up having these reverberations so i just think you know super important to consider and i don't have time to talk about this but you know working in the climate action space like there's also considerations about ecological debt that has to be weighed against cultural debt especially for things like just to highlight this one quadrant you know flying teams all around the world is so important for cultural cohesion but leads to you know carbon emissions and all of this stuff so i think you know we need to think about all of these uh like elements of the framework you know existing in proportion to each other for how to operate sustainably ethically and

like iteratively so yeah does anyone have a question yeah we can go to the question part does anybody anybody has one thank you very much [Applause]