How do we work better together?

Redesigning human organizations from first principles

Working together towards a common goal is one of the distinguishing features of our species. We do this intuitively across smaller groups like families, teams, etc., and we’ve developed tools to coordinate efficiently across larger populations and greater distances.

Money is one such tool — it coordinates the holders across a fair arbiter: markets. Economics runs some of the most complex and herculean human cooperation efforts. Government is another powerful one — we even submit our individual freedoms to the law because everyone agrees so strongly to subscribe to the system (increasingly more arguable as of late, but that’s a whole other topic). The firm is the cooperation tool most relevant to our day-to-day. Firms align people and capital towards the mission of the entrepreneur using culture and power as tools and money, reputation as rewards.

The evolution of human cooperation models has been a slow one. Disrupting established systems is typically only possible through the most extreme forms of creative disruption — revolution, war, bankruptcy, etc.

That is until now — decentralized, autonomous organizations (DAOs) are evolving covertly on the fringes of the internet community now smartly rebranded as Web 3, and they are the sandboxes where the most exciting human coordination experiments will happen in the coming decades.

Described simply, DAOs are like internet flash mobs with money (cryptocurrencies), bound by internet rules (code / protocols / etc). That is the only construct, and the rest is to be decided by the DAOs members themselves — structure, purpose, decisions, etc.

I spent some time diving into the latest experiments in DAOs with my colleague Aaron, and he also went deep into existing governance research. Surprisingly, we found a number of insights already tried by organizations of the past that might help accelerate the development of DAOs and the internet-native organizations of the future.

He summarized our findings well in this post:

What DAOs can Learn from Holacracies & Decades of Corporate Governance Research

I hope you will read it and become a thought partner, because (perhaps expectedly) many of our findings have led us to even more open questions.