The Decentralized Business of Tomorrow — Starts Today
Originally published in ICO Crowd July 2018 issue by Jason Sosa
Understanding Structures of Trust
For thousands of years, the dynamics of what “trust” means and how it is acquired has been based on limited resources, with harsh consequences for welcoming outsiders into the tribe. In small communities around the world your religion, your last name, the clothes you wear, and especially where you’re from mattered.
However, in modern times, things are entirely different. We live in a mass-production and digital information era. In this age of abundance we don’t necessarily need a car, because an Uber will be waiting curbside at the press of a button. In modern cities, there’s a different sort of bubble. The trust dynamics are based on who you know, how eloquently you speak, your background, how clearly and confidently you convey ideas, and what previous accomplishments you claim. The pace has quickened, and the culture of trade and commerce is now a global and diverse community.
This contrast and cultural divide of trust still exists in much of the world today. Understanding the historical structure is critical to building the safeguards. The culture of core contributors and stewards requires more than just bits. We understand that human connections and rituals underlie transactions and that this evolutionary advantage will assist us to bootstrap an ecosystem to place the guard rails, and define the methodology ahead of broader adoption for a truly distributed organization.
The challenge today is that the world of work is dispersed, yet relies on technology silos. Trust in this new blockchain environment changes the game and helps to level the playing field. With many talented workers being scattered around geographic regions due to birthplace, family, or romance, having a sustainable tribe connecting to others you can trust is hard to come by.
Technology continuously changes the way we work. Each “revolution” brings about massive disruption — from farming machines to subway trains, digital medical records to cell phones.
Technology presses forward, and the ways we conduct business, communicate with co-workers and develop products and services have to go along for the ride. Among the buzzword salad that is hyped of late is “artificial intelligence + blockchain.” This time combining two transformative technologies as a set of tools to build new structures of trust, without middlemen, without centralized oversight, in an automated way is known as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
Talent Acquisition Decentralized
With the internet, teams of people can remain connected across vast distances. With increasingly available WiFi, 5G on the horizon, more powerful devices, and mixed reality, the latest revolution is leaning more and more toward decentralization. Connectivity enables a new way to work and live that is not tied to a physical location or central building. This advancement in work reallocation provides a new work alternative that simply wasn’t possible just five years ago.
Call it the “gig economy,” or look at the number of companies people are working for over their careers (compared to previous generations)… Look at the ways casual communication takes place… Even friendships and romantic relationships can be developed with a cell phone and an internet connection.
It only makes sense, then, that the future of work will continue this way, as workers won’t need to (or want to) share offices (or even cities) to be a capable team.
Benefits of a Decentralized Workforce
How do both individuals and businesses stand to gain from a remote staff, flat organizational structures, and digital communication?
The most significant challenges facing organizations looking at the combination of “AI+blockchain” in the future will be unlearning the constraints of the previous business models that had worked for them in the past. Bridging the world from dead trees to smart contracts requires that we create a new set of standards around trust and how business is conducted.
Rewarding Initiative
A decentralized workforce is less hierarchical by its very nature. Transitioning from an employee/employer paternalistic mindset may be the most challenging part of the process as we transition into this future of work. There may still be project owners, creatives, operators, and so on, but each contributor has to be self-motivated for a broad self-managing system to function.
With this new decentralized model, workers are rewarded for initiative and ingenuity through more contracts, higher earnings, more autonomy and responsibility, and so on. By decentralizing, the team becomes more of a meritocracy — where the best work and best ideas are the driving forces of success.
There is no room for favoritism, nepotism, “stepping on toes”, or “squeaky wheels” in this approach to work because it’s painfully obvious when a team member isn’t holding up their end of the bargain. In turn, this empowers the individual to take pride in their work, knowing that quality will be recognized for better or for worse. It also reinforces the ideals of self-motivation, self-reliance, and personal responsibility. Trust is established through the work you do, the way others interact with you, the reliability of your commitments, and so on.
Blackbox has a foundation that acts as the steward overseeing the transition to a DAO structure. Organized for over a year as a flatarchy structure is very dynamic in nature and can be thought of a bit more like an amoeba with a shifting yet stable structure. However, even this flatarchy is temporary, while the dependencies for automation are being built for what will allow us to transition to a world of humans working without middle management. A company run entirely on code.
Flexibility and Speed
Without the overhead that comes with in-house staff, companies can be more agile. Meeting staffing needs becomes a matter of reaching out to trusted team members who can hit the ground running — instead of a long process of onboarding, training, finding physical space, etc.
This means being able to expand to meet demand with ease and adjust for lean times just as quickly. Cooperative enterprises that are united through a shared common bond have the greatest resiliency advantage in the next economic downturn. Work that automates not just the distribution of work, but also the allocation of surplus will see the greatest loyalty from the best and brightest talent, as new global trust networks emerge as distributed applications.
If you need a specialized expert, a decentralized company allows for bringing that individual on as needed, instead of paying to keep them on staff. If there needs to be a big push in one particular area of business, staff can be expanded as needed. Reputation systems and automated onboarding will reduce or altogether eliminate the issues behind trust and organizational friction of working is a distributed way.
For the workers themselves, all of this means having multiple, concurrent opportunities for work. They aren’t beholden to a job, desk, or a 9-to-5 when there isn’t work to be done, and each individual has the ability to determine their own capacity for taking on projects.
Even in an emergency, when company leaders are otherwise occupied or a central office loses power, a decentralized workforce keeps plugging away! What’s more, is that with a global workforce you increase productivity working 24 hours a day.
Decision Making
If projects and daily operations are decentralized and reliant on self-motivated, knowledgeable staff, everyone involved is empowered to make decisions. Instead of a single decision working its way up through a chain of command, each individual can make decisions and stand by them. Trust is earned through the feedback you provide others, consistency in your efforts, and by openly demonstrating your skills.
Team leaders (we prefer to call them stewards) can make choices about how to delegate work based on their own experience and best fit. People can decide when and where they want to work (as long as it meets deadlines, of course) and use their expertise to inform the way the work itself is carried out. The next-generation worker is trusted to get their work done. They are trusted to master their craft, empowered to ask the right questions to follow intrinsic motivations towards mastery.
With less micromanaging and more autonomy, each participant has a more personal connection and ownership to the work they do — which translates directly to more pride, better work, and fewer excuses. Through “artificial intelligence + blockchain” an automated digital nervous system can emerge which empowers workers to contribute from anywhere, with whom they want, whenever they want in a truly meritocratic way.
Growth
With the right systems, standards, and training in place, a decentralized workforce allows companies to grow exponentially. Bringing on new people doesn’t require more office space or increased overhead. The workforce isn’t restricted to just one geographical area — in fact, the entire planet becomes your available talent pool! Repetitive and tedious tasks are eliminated through workflow automation.
Even if you are using physical storefronts or collaborative workspaces, a decentralized model allows you to open these “new branches” with ease, based on where you already have a team in place. Such team members will also be more familiar with a specific region and will be best prepared to identify what products or services will appeal to the people of that region. Systems of trust are transferable across multiple areas of influence and participation ensuring that everyone is aligned towards the shared common good.
With people in multiple cities and countries, a company also gains access to each person’s professional network, meaning that the workforce can be easily expanded through trusted referrals — and an almost automatic vetting process.
Redundancy and Security
Decentralizing allows for multiple iterations of documentation, versions of projects, and independently managed materials. There is no central server to hack or even a single location that can fall victim to natural disaster. If a computer crashes, someone else has the files…
While cloud storage and blockchain technology also help to resolve these potential problems, having a physically decentralized business also keeps intellectual property more protected.
So, decentralizing doesn’t just follow with technological trends. It actually stands to improve the way people work, the way people earn trust, and thereby, improve the way they live. The most considerable advantages here are psychological — that people feel autonomous, take pride and personal ownership in their work, and that they are afforded more freedom to follow their intrinsic motivations to do what works best for them. In all instances, empowered, fulfilled workers produce better, more profitable work as well!
Decentralizing is becoming more and more possible because of technology, but the models prove to be working because of how they affect people. With all of the modern ways to communicate and collaborate, people, are discovering that working on their own terms improves their quality of life AND the overall success of the organizations they work for.
A Business Operating System
We saw that the current corporate and capital structures limited an individual’s potential to create value. Titles, departments, hours, offices, outdated processes like performance management systems and siloed thinking perpetually minimized human potential, as we seek to be better we need a radical change. As traditional organizations shift from antiquated business models, they’ll require an interface between current paper and electronic contracts and smart contracts. Blackbox OS bridges the gap between the decentralized world and allows organizations to unleash the power of distributed technology and Artificial Intelligence.
Modules are designed to conquer widespread, specific business problems related to to decentralized collaboration. Modules contribute a blend of protocols, additional code, IP and AI with the goal of being easily integrated into existing collectives or groups to provide quick wins.
We’re building the blueprint to reimagine what an organization is at its core. We’re moving us all forward towards a better way to work and add value. An ecosystem and protocol to propose, contribute and measure that value. Influence is earned through a reputation system by consensus review (voting) and consistently demonstrating execution skills (PoV).
Deliverable Values Points (DVP), or the estimated value of a “Deliverable,” is determined during the proposal stage, and discussed by experts until they reach consensus.
Once a proposal is accepted, participants can “bid” on owning deliverables (based on skills/reputation/availability). Upon owning a deliverable, the actual payout is the value of the owned deliverable, multiplied with the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) and the Quality Factor determined through a Proof of Value (PoV).
The Blackbox Token powers a business operating system for distributed organizations and individuals. Basically we’re unifying independent practitioners, agencies, collectives, and knowledge work as a whole. The token, network, operating system, business model, and underlying philosophy address the root challenges of hierarchical and centralized inefficiencies. You can learn more by reading our Manifesto and white paper.
This new way to work and organizational model is designed around the entrepreneurial mindset and provides a hybrid approach towards shared benefits and managed risk in a way that provides greater benefits for the whole. We are on the cusp of a transformation, in how business is conducted, as well as for human productivity and creativity. Join us.
