Decentralized Organizations

• Minimum Viable Structure

• Collective Decision-Making

• Accountability Requires Transparency

  • We are not usually taught to collaborate
    • Psychological safety is the number one factor of highly productive teams
      • Study from GOOGLE
      • Building high trust as the foundation of a good team

• Course - Patterns of Decentralized Organizing

• https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/

• Valve Employee Handbook

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Orgs)

Good definitions

A DAO is an internet-native entity with no central management which is regulated by a set of automatically enforceable rules on a public blockchain, and whose goal is to take on a life of its own and incentivize people to achieve a shared common mission. (Aragon) a community of people making decisions together in a decentralized manner, made autonomous through their software underpinnings. A DAO can be thought of as a tool that can be leveraged by communities and organizations of different types. (DAOHaus)

• Bitcoin is the most famous example of a DAO

Examples:

• Aragon
• DaoHaus

Frédéric Laloux on a New Management Paradigm

Sense and Respond: Frédéric Laloux on a New Management Paradigm

The way we run organizations is broken

• Too slow, bureaucratic, not agile, innovative
• Words like care and love are repudiated
• Not the leaders’ fault
  • It’s the management system
  • Executives are at the edge of burnout

Cultural Paradigms

Lean and Agile Adoption with the Laloux Culture Model

1. Wolfpack Tribe Paradigm Red (mafia)
   • Powerful leader inspires fears in enemies
   • Good for chaotic situations
   • Division of labor
2. Army Paradigm Amber (government)
   • Strict hierarchical structure
   • Stability and control
   • Long-term perspective
   • Formal processes and roles
3. Machine - Orange (most corporations)
   • Competition within the organization and with other organizations
   • Focus on profit and growth
   • Leaders set the strategy, lower levels have some freedom
   • Focus on innovation, accountability and meritocracy
4. Family Green (Ben & Jerry’s)
   • Focus on delighting customers, shared values and high engagement
   • Balance the needs of all stakeholders
   • Culture over strategy
   • HIerarchical structure may conflict with people’s desire for ore autonomy
5. Living System -Teal
   • Anti fragile structure (flat, or evolving roles)
   • Shared goal (making the world better)
   • Distributed decision making (advice process)
   • Wholeness (safety, not being judged)
   • Self-management
   • Evolutionary purpose

Principles for new orgs

1. Self-management (no boss-subordinate relationships)
   • Hierarchies can’t deal with complex systems
   • Still need people who can take a broad perspective
2. Wholeness
   • No need to wear a professional masks
   • When you show up partially, you also show up with part of your energy, creativity, passion and motivation
   • Simple practices can bring a sense of safety, vibrancy that allow people to show up fully
3. Evolutionary Purpose
   • Organization as a living organism with its own sense of direction
   • World is so complex that the best thing we can do is not to predict and control but to sense and respond
     • Following an old plan when circumstances change can be detrimental

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040 Career MOC | Business | 030 Macro MOC

Samantha Slade - Going Horizontal

• Employee dissatisfaction is not actually being fixed by current practices (adding a ping pong table)
• Humans didn’t evolve in formal hierarchies (tribes may have emerging, dynamic hierarchies, not formally set ones)
  • But in our workplace somehow we are forced to adjust to it
  • It’s so pervasive it somehow feels natural
• Changing the company structure without changing its cultural won’t work

Three Types of Practices

• Personal (quiet and organic) practices

• Informal (collective and safe)

• Prototyping (collective and formal)

• Horizontal practices/structure often get dismissed at the first difficulty

  • Forgetting/ignoring the many difficulties in traditional structures as well

Principles

1. Autonomy
   • Claiming your leadership
2. Purpose
   • The more explicit, the more people can be autonomous
3. Meetings
   • Show me how your meetings run and I’ll explain your culture
   • How can our meetings become a fractal of the world we want to live in?
4. Transparency
   • Open is effective and efficient
   • Transparency is needed if we want to truly collaborate
5. Decision-making
6. Learning & Development
   • Self-directed and collectively held
7. Relationship and Conflict