For DAOs, with Love. Part one: Big ideas worth chasing.

In 2010 I stumbled across a ‘big idea’.

In the decade since, building out this idea has changed how I earn a livelihood, build a career, engage in activism, community and orientate around purpose. It changed my life.

The idea?

A group of people exploring new and different ways of building a company focused around a social mission.

The mission was “More people working on stuff that matters.”

If we keep trying to solve the urgent, important problems we have with the resources we currently have to solve them, we simply won’t get there. We need to radically increase the amount of people working on solving the greatest challenges of our time.

We need more resources. We need more capacity. We need new and different solutions. We need to work faster. We need to change things at a systems level.

We need more people working on the stuff that really matters.

This was the call to arms that attracted people to start building Enspiral in 2010. I think it is just as relevant today.

What was most interesting about it?

Enspiral was more than a compelling mission statement.

At the time Enspiral was a group of people building startups to solve real world challenges. Teams formed to work on problems like the food system, community education, decision-making, professional services to support entrepreneurs and local innovation support programmes. What made it different and compelling was the collective methods and systems thinking applied to how we organised together. Enspiral wasn’t building one company to create one solution to a specific problem led by a few specific people. It was a set of methods and ideas to help entrepreneurs to build businesses in a different way.

By experimenting with governance, ownership and control could we contribute toward improving the systemic issues, failures and inequities in our normal way of structuring, funding, owning and building companies?

In order to build solutions that change the system we had to address how we organise and distribute value. To do that we had to run experiments to get started.

Some of these ‘we organise differently’ ideas and values at Enspiral were captured in axioms like:

• Distributing money, information and control.
  Rather than let a few people in leadership control things, let’s work to maximize the autonomy of everyone involved. Let’s build systems and processes to distribute decision making and governance. Let’s figure out how to make everything (especially money and decision making) transparent and inclusive to everyone.
• No one leads all of the time, everyone leads some of the time.
  Let’s explicitly have no formal top down command and control structure and instead work to recognise the leadership potential in everyone. There is no CEO. There is no leadership team. Let’s ensure strategy and direction is set collectively. Let’s work with flexible processes to serve emergent needs, rather than bureaucratic processes and top down control.
• Create opportunities not jobs, and let the right people hire themselves.
  To encourage a culture of entrepreneurship let’s give everyone the opportunity to be an owner and navigate their own path to find success. Enspiral won’t give you a job, it’s a space for you to find your purpose, meet your tribe and create your own dream job. Let’s make it compelling to join but harder to stay and let people figure out for themselves what is going to work.
• The company of the future will look and feel more like a community.
  Let’s work hard to make the explicit social mission and values the cultural attractor and filter. If we model radical generosity, maybe it will catch on. If we prioritize long term relationship building over short term deals we’ll all be better off in the end. Encourage, celebrate and value the work to build trust, deepen relationships and care.

Today, if you’re building a DAO these ideas might sound very familiar.

Back an internet lifetime ago in 2010 there was no real concept of crypto tokens. ‘Decentralised organising’ was a very fringe concept in management theory and labels like ‘social enterprise’ ‘holocracy’ and ‘teal’ weren’t widespread enough to be useful. This made Enspiral confusing. The best description was probably something along the lines of “startup incubator meets Occupy Wall Street meets facilitation geeks meets freelancer cooperative meets community of friends that can throw great parties.”

None of these things are particularly new or groundbreaking on their own. Enspiral just mixed them together into homemade organisational rocket fuel and lit it on fire.

This is similar energy to what I see in Web3 and why I’m excited about it.

DAOs as a laboratory for improving democracy and capitalism.

We have a lot of systems level work to do on spaceship Earth. Capitalism (urgently) needs to evolve to have less destructive externalities and better, fairer distributions of value. We need to remove structural, systemic barriers to make the starting line and opportunity horizon more equitable. Methods of civic democratic governance (desperately) need to evolve out of the 18th century and catch up to the present.

Enter Web3?

Every week new DAOs spin up experimenting with internal token economies and programmable governance structures. Web3 today is a landscape of hundreds of real time experiments innovating on organisational structure, governance and democratic capital allocation. There is a decent chance some of these experiments point the way to solutions that make significant positive impact.

I think new tools, currencies and legal frameworks that enable new organisational experiments have great potential. The rush of energy, resources and talented people moving in on this is exciting.

I’m also wary of the hype.

Building effective decentralised organisations is hard. It requires a committed group of people strapping in and holding on for a ride that covers a lot of weird, often invisible, terrain:

• Understanding how power, leadership and management manifests in an organisation without bosses or positional hierarchy.
• Facilitating large collective discussions to form clear agreements, decisions and outcomes with people spreading every timezone with different levels of capability and context.
• Building strong relationships and the awareness, alignment and care to stay together, learning and iterating through inevitable failures and conflicts.
• Recognising and understanding group dynamics to continually, proactively distribute power and resources to enable everyone to maximise their potential.

These are just a few of the deep human group coordination challenges. Add to that the complexity of tokenomics, crypto protocols, on chain tooling and legal ambiguity that comes with building in a Web3 context…

Combining all these challenges to build competitive decentralized organizations that seek to establish new business models and disrupt existing markets, using unproven technology and navigating compliance headaches… perhaps that goes beyond hard. Perhaps that is closer to crazy.

However, given the level of change we need to improve our society, ‘crazy’ is good. Crazy is needed.

We need to support the people willing to try.

It’s with that spirit that I hope this is a useful contribution to folks out there building and experimenting.

For DAOs trying to disrupt incumbents and do something different, meaningful and systemic, I think the big idea worth chasing is the same one that helped fuel Enspiral. It is led by just one question:

What will we learn when we try?

Read Part 2 here.
Read the full post on the Better Work Together blog.