For DAOs, with Love. Part two: Working blueprints.
Like any organic system, Enspiral evolved and changed constantly. There was no working structure out of the box. What served in the beginning didn’t serve through growth stages and is different from what exists today.
If you’re building a DAO or web3 ecosystem, hopefully some of the things we learned will help you avoid some pain or failure and succeed faster. As with any organizational model, the concept is easier than the practice. Nothing is ever as clean or sharp in real life as it is on a page or powerpoint. Not everything will work the way for you in the way it did for Enspiral, but through running experiments value will emerge.
To that end you can consider these blueprints a working theory derived from years of iteration and practice. It is an exaggerated creative model of the possible, drawn from things we tried, things that worked and things that could have worked better.
The 6 basic elements in this model are:
1) A shared mission.
There needs to be a thing in the middle that everyone shows up for.
It doesn’t need to be specific, but it does need to be understood easily. It can be a felt sense or an explicit tangible goal. It doesn’t even need to mean the same thing to everyone involved. It just needs to work.
In Enspiral you could ask 10 different people what the purpose of it was and get 10 different answers. But the underlying intent was probably something along the lines of:
Spend my time working on high leverage problems I care about that make the world a better place. Do it with people I care about, do it in a way that gets me what I need and aligns with my values.
2) Around 200 high agency people.
This collective model is designed around independent, autonomous people galvanized together by a shared sense of purpose and identity. These people are entrepreneurs in charge of their own destiny, with something meaningful to gain together. They are not employees being assembled to execute someone’s vision.
200 is a good number.
It is small enough to create coherence and an interdependent core of strong relationships (ie: a good sized group of people who genuinely care for each other and whose economic and community lives are interdependent).
It is large enough that there are gradients of context, commitment and fuzzy edges. It allows for a healthy flow of new people, ideas and potential with ‘kind of involved’ as well as ‘all in’ participation. It took Enspiral about 5 years to grow to around these numbers, the growth was slow, steady and organic, relationship by relationship.
3) Support to build ventures.
When you bring together a group of entrepreneurs, you also bring along their ventures, side projects and unbuilt, brewing ideas. With 200 self-starting people you’ll no doubt end up with various logos, ventures, initiatives, projects, tactics for all sorts of things. Different products and ideas for different markets, but aligned by purpose, values and underlying intent of the founders and builders.
By actively encouraging and supporting ventures to form, the collective of the group to solve problems, grow together and make impact dramatically increases.
This element is an important part of the economic resilience of this collective model. Building ventures and creating interdependent livelihoods and economic potential are what separates a model like this from becoming limited to a community or mutual aid / shared interest group.
4) A central structural and finance commons.
In the middle of the system is a transparent, well organised entity that manages common assets, brand identity, collects and redistributes common resources and interfaces with the legal world. This legal, structural entity is supported, owned and governed by the community. It is the physical organisational manifestation of the gravity that holds everything together.
There is a critical shared alignment, responsibility and commitment that emerges when a group actually owns, governs and cares for something together. This goes beyond ‘a sense of shared ownership’, or an ‘act like an owner’ culture. It means real structural, legal shared ownership.
5) Space for relationships and weaving social fabric.
This fabric of community, connection and belonging is hard to measure and often invisible but it is fundamentally critical.
Community isn’t ‘the soft part’ to make people feel good. This is about more than vibes. Trust is a secret weapon. Connection creates safety and fuels ambition. You can go bigger when you know people (really) have your back. Investing in strong relationships that outlive projects and ventures is where the true long term potential of the system is developed. Strong social fabric is also what makes the organisation an awesome place to be, full of love, friendship, self development and great parties!
6) Together as a system: A platform for collective ambition.
The sum total of these elements is a collective platform for greater shared ambition. The mission attracts attention and great people. Relationships compound value over time. Sharing common resources catalyse unexpected opportunities and partnerships. Every person and every associated venture can increase their impact by leveraging the collective in some way that best serves their needs.
In short, when it all works together well, it’s amazing. As entrepreneurs this is why it’s worth showing up rather than building solo. This is where the ‘return on investment’ lives for ‘making this work for me’ type thinking.
Organising these elements coherently
How do we put these elements together? How do they actually fit together and work as processes?
In order to work as adaptable practical blueprints, let’s break these elements down into layers.
The legal structural layer.
In this case, the system is legally held together by a limited liability company, with a few important tweaks:
- The constitution dictates all surplus finances are distributed back out to the membership to spend on the shared mission.
- Shareholders act as cultural stewards and have no financial upside to be gained.
- The entity in the middle holds the central brand IP and manages financial and legal compliance associated with shared systems and the basic membership model.
- This entity generally doesn’t take holdings of other companies or build up financial resources. It exists to distribute resources and create opportunities, not centralise wealth.
- A special role is created for directors to serve on a ‘Minimal Viable Board’. This is described further in roles below.
The shared financial management layer.
Everyone in the system contributes something to the commons. The goal is to ensure the collective finances are well managed, transparent and there is surplus to be redistributed out to flow through the collective, helping spur new ideas and initiatives. This requires:
- Transparent, simple membership management.
- Clear decision and record keeping on what the core operating costs are.
- Transparent management and reporting of the finances available for use by the community.
- Setting up systems for distributing funds back out into the community (collaborative budgeting and funding processes).
The roles and coordination layer.
“Self organisation” isn’t magic. There are critical pieces of infrastructure required in order to allow a system to enable self organised, autonomous action. Role clarity is one of these pieces.
In this model there are several important roles:
Identity roles
Members & Contributors.
Everyone in the system holds 1 of 2 identities. These roles have no formal hierarchical advantages over each other. Everyone is responsible for their own engagement and has equal opportunity to propose changes, vote, instigate activity etc. Members hold an extra responsibility to act as cultural stewards with a specific role to invite new contributors, create new members and govern any serious cultural breaches or conflicts.
Aside from the cultural stewardship adopted by members, all functional roles are open to everyone. The overall health of the system is the responsibility of everyone contributing to it.
Functional roles
Catalysts
Funded execution focused roles to help enable working groups, unblock challenges, create connections and opportunities for contributors. The mandate of these roles are defined by the community, supported by a working group and could be described as decentralized executive roles or community builders.
Working Groups
Working groups are small groups of people working together as teams to execute projects. These working groups may have an independent budget assigned by the community or be self financed via voluntary / community contributions. They may ‘pop up’ to execute something specific like running a community event, or serve an ongoing core function like managing a website or running a newsletter.
MVB / ‘Minimal Viable Board’
A special role is created for the legal directors of the limited liability company in the middle of the community. They have an explicit, mandated role to ensure financial compliance and to act as filters, raising any existential risks and pushing all strategic direction setting back out into the community. Operating like a bottom up support backstop, rather than a top down direction setting entity.
Assembly Sprints/Sprinters.
A coordination mechanism where ‘heavy lifting’ for the community is executed in a short burst of time (2–4 weeks). This allows busy people from across the community to be able to ‘tune in’ to effectively do collective work for a set period of time and for catalysts to coordinate these efforts. These sprints become spaces to set collective goals, execute larger pieces of work or build momentum for longer collective processes or projects.
The social layer.
This is where the nature and needs of the people come before anything else. Proven patterns for supporting social cohesion exist. Some successful experiments to consider are:
Stewardship circles.
Every single person supports someone else in a one way relationship. Everyone gives and receives support in the community. It creates a ‘social field’ of indirect reciprocity.
Pods.
Small autonomous groups with set committed rhythms of gathering and relatively high barrier to entry. Pods are formed around specific interests, regions or a common thread of learning and commitment to support. Everyone in the community has the opportunity to start or join a small support pod related to their needs or interests.
Retreats.
Bi-annual, well organised hosted gatherings are the cultural heartbeat of the system. To host 100+ people in coherent, safe, inspiring multi-day gatherings is an art form. By creating the opportunity for people in the collective to step in and do the work, these muscles get built quickly by many people. Organising a retreat is recognised as an act of service that will return to the team who does it in many ways.
The governance layer.
Making decisions together
This capacity of the community to have robust, clear, evolving discussions that are woven together and facilitated towards shared decisions is critical to success. This is an expression of collective intelligence. It is off chain. It does not require tokens to manage. It cannot be installed into a group. It is where collective synthesis happens, It requires trust, empathy, skilful communication and listening. The only real way to develop it is through practice but there are plenty of useful maps out there.
Enspiral was lucky. We had the equivalent of an in-house team building bespoke decision making software to enable structural and cultural innovations in governance and control. Simply put, for our journey with Enspiral would be unimaginable without Loomio being built along the way. We could not have survived without the online facilitation skills and decision-making protocols and processes developed by many people, through practice, around the tool.
Defining governance
The ‘hard governance’ of the system is outlined in relatively simple agreements that describe processes for roles, decision-making, cultural norms. Everything lives in a public handbook. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking about any of the agreements, it is how they hang together to create an enabling environment that is valuable.
The foundational agreement is the decision-making agreement, which acts as meta-governance and outlines how we decide how we decide, and how we change what we have decided.
The economic partnership layer.
This layer creates visible association, collaboration and sponsorship between associated ventures. These relationships of support may be held by community members but are formalized in the system through sponsorships and brand agreements between ventures.
It is through these partnerships that joint ventures, collaborations or new initiatives emerge and are enabled to grow out of the community.
Nice theory — how does it work in practice?
Everything listed comes from real experiments that we ran in some form or another, or are continuing to run at Enspiral. When you put all these structural layers together, they form the blueprints of a potent organizational model that will enable entrepreneurs to thrive interdependently.
However, the model is still just an idea. Experiments are where the real work is and the real progress is made. If you start to run experiments, don’t expect everything in this model tol be helpful or useful.
Not everything will be needed or useful to your organization. Not everything will be needed to create a functioning system. Not everyone will see value or interact with all layers. Different people may show up for different things. Different communities may leverage these layers differently depending on what the collective strategy is.
The potential lies in adaptation and execution.
Read the full post on the Better Work Together blog.
