How To Govern Your Self, Others, And The World (in web3)

From the ugliness of rot,
springs forth new germination,
bearing life nourishing abundance.

“Hard times create strong men,
strong men create good times,
good times create weak men,
and weak men create hard times.”
- G. Michael Hopf

We forget to govern. We become blindsided by the busy-ness of life, leading to a passive acceptance of the status quo.

Innovation accelerates yet deficiencies rust away the infrastructure we have come to depend on. That divergence leads to the cyclic nature of boom and bust.

Today: a new promise of ‘web3 governance’ shifts our trajectory of increasing tyranny towards a fresh start for humanity at large.

Start with self-governance. Move on to community governance. Then help influence how governance operates throughout the world.

But how?

The Essence of Governance

In essence, governance can be reduced to just a handful of requirements:

1. Prioritize — identify and communicate issues, gaps, and opportunities that require decisions and action. There are plenty of systems and tools for this.
2. Assign — based on some measure of merit (ability, interest, reputation, responsibility, etc).
3. Measure — the contribution of prioritized assignment to confirm success, learn by trial, error and results, and then re-assign newly prioritized opportunity.

In web3 we want to distribute those requirements as widely as serves to increase valuable contribution through distributed incentives for participation.

Sounds good. But the challenge of governance is not in the ‘what’, but the ‘how’.

How do we decide the measures of contribution? Or how to incentivize them?

How do we prioritize issues, gaps, and opportunities?

How do we assess ‘merit’ for assignment and accountability?

The Ugliness of Imposition

As a certified emotional therapist I see the psychology of governance as reaching far below the surface of process and mechanism to some ugliness of human interaction.

Bias. Intellectual dishonesty. Callousness. Fear. All human vices enter the mixing pot of governance. By what possible imagination does anyone truly believe that we should have the power to vote on political issues that restrict or even control other people’s lives?

You don’t need a therapy certification to see that forcing one groups will on to others against their will is probably wrong in almost all circumstances…

Governance is fundamental — and we’re now at a planet wide cross-roads awakening to the absurd lack of civility that comes from today’s governance structures at large.

Fundamentals of Better Governance

If governance is about making fair consensus (to prioritize issues, accountabilities and incentives):

• How much consensus should be required in order to approve appointment or action?
• Does distributed governance require ‘delegation’ of ‘authority’?
• How much accountability and authority does an appointed ‘delegate’ of an election gain?
• What are they a delegate of, exactly? The will of the community, or just a sanction to assert their own individual will for the duration of their appointment?
• And how do we reconcile the idea of ‘leadership’ with ‘decentralized governance’? Thus what should ‘leadership’ mean within the context of distributed governance?

To truly answer these questions we need to…

Start From The Heart

I have thus far spotted 3 fundamental challenges of human interaction that need to be addressed in order to maximize the distribution of consensus-making governance.

In fact, these may be the only 3 negatives that need be eliminated (from both self and society) to create untold abundant synergy. They are:

1. Violent Communication
2. Un-meritocratic One-upmanship
3. Coercion

To put this in context of web3 governance here’s…

A Brief History Of Distributed Governance

1960s:

Marshall Rosenberg developed Nonviolent Communication in the 1960’s with the explicit view that “everyone’s needs matter”, providing a framework for one to one communication that seeks to eliminate conflict by wholly respecting the uniqueness of each individual. See https://www.cnvc.org

1980s:

Then, Gerard Endenhurg’s 1980’s framework Sociocracy helped elevate Nonviolent Communication for group application with the essential idea of “every voice matters”, with the goal to optimize connection in support of self-governance. https://www.sociocracyforall.org

2000's

Brian Robertson then elevated Sociocracy towards a modern business framework called Holacracy around 2007, with the explicit focus of being “a complete wholesale replacement of the management hierarchy.” https://www.holacracy.org

Now

Holacracy became inspiration to various web3 groups, including Holochain, https://www.holochain.org (for who I attended and spoke at a 2018 Hackathon in Portugal), and DAO tooling initiatives such as Hypha DHO https://hypha.earth and Nestr https://nestr.io (both of which are now in the Helios Incubator program https://www.heliosrising.com for web3 startups).

Removing The Impurities of Governance

A jet engine can be stalled by impurities in the fuel. To the extent we have violent communication, egoic one-upmanship, and coercion as inherent components of our governance systems, we will not tap the full power of fairly distributed governance.

First…

Eliminate non-violent communication by respecting the uniqueness of each contributors perspective.

Recognizing that a lot of ‘disagreement’ comes from a valid difference of experience, personal needs, and information, should allow us to calmly cater to the differences, becoming inclusive, collating contributions, and allowing the great mixing pot of distributed ideas to help inform an accurately prioritized backlog of available opportunities.

Second…

Reduce the egoic conflicts of one-upmanship resultant from agenda-driven influence and immature ‘leadership’.

To the extent that the loudest, most expressive, most dominant personality in the room gains the authoritative position of delegation whether indirectly or explicitly, is a failure of distributed governance. Overbearingness should never be a determinant of governance, if distribution of governance is the goal.

Third…

Eliminate the threat of coercion within society that results from failure to address points 1 and 2 within the broader political arena.

It is only because of our collective failures to address points 1 and 2 that a political system results in society where one group of people, be it a majority or a minority, have the power to coerce (threaten with force). This leads to corrupt systems, blackmail, force backed taxation, regulations that take away individual rights, and wars.

Inch, by Inch, Step by Step

The closer that governance systems become to eliminating these 3 impurities, the faster and easier we will see distributed governance flourish and replace the decaying rot of centralized governance worldwide.

But alas… giving up central control towards distributed governance requires a lot of confidence in those handing over the reigns of power. Both to remain relevant and part of the system, and confidence that the distribution (delegation) of power will result in net benefit.

Thus…

The Benevolent Dictator’s Dilemma

As a case in point, I am close to becoming a large land owner with a view to launch a Land DAO. How much governance ownership over decisions with the land, or even fractional ownership of the land, should I give to the DAO community? 50%… 100%?

Must I see myself (and more very small core group of collaborators), as a kind of Benevolent Dictator until such time as I/we can confidently distribute decision making power to a growingly competent larger group of stakeholders?

What distributed governance communities can any of us currently point to that we feel truly reflects a broad diversification of governance power across a varied and large community?

So where do we go from here?

The BIG and loooong question:

How do we engineer better governance towards wider distribution that is non-violent, broadly accounting to the diverse needs of stakeholders… eliminates the knee-jerk reaction of egoically driven one-upmanship… and moves us beyond the psychology of accepting coercion (or bribery, or imposition) across all areas of organizational and societal governance?

Introducing:

A 5-Factor Protocol For Distributing Governance

All organizations by nature need a function, a purpose, a direction. That ‘purpose’ may come from one or more people, and evolve over time through innovation and elevation by a growing group of contributors.

That said, here’s how it can be done:

1. Gather insights about the interests, needs and BFDs (beliefs, frustrations, and desires) of the intended audience and stakeholders.

2. Collate those insights into something of a transparent and accessible knowledge base, situational map, mind-map, list or otherwise ‘backlog’ of ideas.

3. Work to define those ideas with sufficient clarity as to achieve consensus on their nuances (intentions, success criteria, work to execute) — rather than losing authenticity by generalizing those ideas too much (happens a lot in product management unfortunately… and politics).

4. Prioritize those initiatives (via the appropriate level of consensus across stakeholders) using mechanisms that are visible and agreed to by stakeholders.

5. Enabling contributors to execute as fast as possible on all fronts to achieve key milestones through POOGI (process of on-going improvement) in exchange for stated incentives/rewards.

Secret Sauce: User-Centred Design Skills for Distributed Governance

UX researchers will make good stewards of distributed governance because they are familiar with a plethora of tools for recording ideas without biasing the data with personal agenda.

Tools may include one-to-one interviews, various forms of survey (micro surveys such as polling, and more extensive like a CSAT or NPS).

From there, collating insight through technical or non-technical forms of data mining help categorize data into clear insight.

Publishing and presenting those findings in such things as Kanban boards, roadmaps, slides, mind-maps.

Elections or delegated assignment of decisions making authority to prioritize available options such as via the Eden process https://genesis.eden.eoscommunity.org, the Fractally process https://fractally.com, or various forms of DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) tooling.

Use of formal OKRs (objectives and key results) and KPI (key performance indicator) processes adopted by contributors for accountability and measures of success.

In Essence:

Leadership is not telling people what to do, or making decisions on behalf of people. Leadership is coalescing people’s interests and helping organize those interests to collectively achieve success.

‘Decentralized Leadership’ means having widely distributed visibility of gaps, issues, challenges and opportunities, with broadly elected delegation to move prioritized consensus forward.

Let’s make it happen:

• Start from the heart. Govern your self through clarity of intent and discipline of right action.
• Synergize through a commitment to eliminate violent communication and egoic one-upmanship.
• Build consensus by recording, collating, organizing, and prioritizing stakeholder ideas.
• Delegate and incentivize contributions with visible accountabilities.

Stop tyranny. Free humanity.

Gavriel Shaw
https://twitter.com/GavrielShaw

See my previous article: Governance In A Web3 World — 4 Principles For Creator Incentivized Network Effects

References

https://www.heliosrising.com for a web3 incubator building towards a stakeholder managed venture capital fund.

https://avolve.io for a DAO builder community.

On Sociocracy, Holacracy, and Non Violent Communication:

https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy-and-nonviolent-communication-nvc/

https://www.calmachiever.com/holacracy-nvc-nonviolent-communication/