Synergy In Networked Teams

Team Management For Rapid Talent Coordination Within Decentralizing Organizations — Accelerating Synergy With Ease — v1

This is a highly-opinionated description of exactly how consortiums can form to achieve high performance output, aligned with the values of distributed decision making and contributor empowerment through ownership and autonomy.

Relevant to web3, remote work, DAO’s, Sociocracy, inclusivity… and all that jazz.

Note: Challenges and input is most welcome inside the SingularityHaven Telegram or in the comments below to help purify and make all this highly practical.

What Needs To Change

In the quest for ‘decentralization’ we abandon the moors of traditional best practice people management.

Alas! We have thrown the baby out with the bath water!

Our focus on inclusivity, diversity, and decentralization has left us floundering for sustainable success.

Relationship management has displaced performance management.

Tokens have replaced sense.

Individual role possessiveness has collapsed the synergy of shared Key Performance Indicators.

Junior staff with naive passion become arrogant influencers… while experienced talent shy away from time-consuming, energy-draining, debate.

None of it works.

So dogmatic leaders and founders direct as ‘benevolent dictators’ by breaking all of their own rules, compounding the consequences of piss poor governance, half-baked policy, and surface level adherence to decentralization.

Passion is not enough. As famous personal development coach Tony Robbins once rather dryly put it: “You can motivate a room full of idiots… but then you just end up with motivated idiots”.

The inmates are running the asylum.

Lets not blame ourselves too much… because we’re all trying the very best we are currently capable of… and this web3 thing is so darn new.

But lets expand our capability by taking responsibility here and now to resolve the most important mission for humanity today: Quality collaboration through better team management. The worlds needs this now more than ever.

Post-mortem survey’s of startup founders list ‘team related issues’ in the top 3 reasons for failure — and yet collectively we mentally evade the responsibility of risk management within our teams and organizations by turning a blind eye to conflicts and constraints — wanting to control our territory, not step on toes, not have our toes be stepped on, and so it goes.

What To Change To

We need radical innovation to solve all constraints to human coordination with a new form of organizational development that solves for all areas of human wellbeing.

Purpose — All The Way Down

Before web3, before digital automation, before tokenization — even before personal computers — cutting edge management practice began to emerge in the 1970s.

Bill Oncken nailed the essence of effective and efficient people management thus:

“All projects and tasks shall be owned and handled at the lowest organization level consistent with their welfare.”

Yes! That directly speaks to our web3 value of autonomy and ownership of roles.

And the in-built caveat is project welfare. That is, quality of results. That is, performance, effectiveness, success criteria.

Oncken further identified that management should be “hands-off as much as possible and hands-on as much as necessary”.

…As necessary to ensure the desired outcome.

And while it is necessary to define overall organizational purpose. It is NOT sufficient to stop there.

Purpose must exist explicitly with painstaking comprehensive clarity and transparency at EVERY ‘level’ of an organization.

Because a hierarchy of requirements is inherent in achieving a purpose, replace soul-based hierarchies (people) with role-based hierarchies (functions). 

Only when deliverables and subsequent dependencies are made clear can teams be most effective. This should be obvious, and yet we flounder in a haze of loosey-goosey free-reigning individual autonomy, having not mastered the distinction of ‘role’ vs ‘soul’.

Roles Before Souls

Also in the 1970’s, from a very different angle of maximizing inclusivity and respectful autonomy without hierarchical dictatorship, Sociocracy evolved the notions of consent-based collaboration.

It popularized the idea that “the role is not the soul” which is superficially interpreted as ‘duties of a role should not be pinned to the value of the person who contributes to the role’.

This becomes an insidious get out clause, where best efforts are applauded regardless of performance.

Oh contraire, we need to turn this entirely on its head!

The role should not be tied to an individual at the point of defining the role.

Roles are requirements for innovation and operation.

Roles MUST be achieved one way or another, by one or more people, whoever or however proves capable.

Define roles independent of people who contribute to fulfilling them. The role is not the soul.

Roles are inherent to the purpose of the organization, at all levels of welfare.

Make role descriptions granular with clear specificity. Use SOP’s (standard operating procedures) or process check-lists.

Each role includes it’s function (why it exists, what it exists to provide or achieve) and its SOP.

Where those SOP’s are ill-defined, they will become better defined through a cycle of experimentation, learning and innovation.

Only once alignment exists within the group on roles should assignments be considered.

Note: Without clearly defining roles BEFORE assigning roles to souls, roles are greatly influenced by the souls who inhabit them.

Souls then identify as ‘owners’ of roles, leading teams towards the conflicts of borders and boundaries rather than collaborative participation.

Said another way: Roles are not to be shaped subjectively on the basis of available contributors, but rather on the objective basis of fulfilling organizational purpose.

Piecemeal Decision-Making

Bill Oncken also identified a management technique to maximise available quality of performance, described as an insurance policy with 2 options:

“Recommend, and then act. If there is a high risk then the team member should be told to recommend, then get approval (or ‘consent’) from the manager (or ‘circle’) and then act.”

“Act, and then advise. If there is little risk, then the team member can act and then advise the manager (or circle) of the results. As team members get more proficient in their tasks this will happen more, but the responsibility has to be delegated (or consented) from the manager (or circle) to ensure safety.”

How pithy. How fitting for balancing the risk of enabling distributed decision making through contributor autonomy, while also ensuring alignment and maximum quality assurance among the wider group.

How To Cause The Change

Get together with willing participants, and without assigning accountabilities, work to identify a logical array of requirements, milestones and critical success factors (CSFs) that can move the needle towards organizational purpose.

There are just 2 fundamental principles to grasp for cyclic synergistics:

• Phased Prioritization

• Transparent Deliberation

Phased Prioritization

Instead of assigning or proposing a project in entirety, all projects for decentralized decision making move through two distinct phases: OC and AC.

OC: Opportunity Consent

Begin by gaining consent on a gap, challenge, or problem. This can be done on calls or in chat or in documents.

• Clearly state the opportunity.
• Detail how it relates to purpose.
• Validate the opportunity with evidence.
• Assess the impact of inaction vs resolution.
• Gain consent.

AC: Approach Consent

Once consent is gained on the opportunity to be addressed, contributors can collate possible approaches to address the opportunity and then arrive at a starting point.

• Present options.
• Justify preferences.
• Seek input.
• Gain consent.
• Here’s a template. Copy the file and build better together.

Transparent Deliberation

To deliberate means to conduct intentional and diligent consideration. Distributed decision making requires diligence. Embrace it.

Input should be welcome by anyone at any time. Documents should be commentable. The collective spirit is to pursue better ways of doing things, based on experience, talent, research and experimentation.

Use shared drives and documentation. Decentralized decision-making can not happen when work-in-progress is kept on private drives. On the whole, all project work should be accessible to anyone trusted by the team.

How To Consent

Sociocracy does a good job of describing the difference between consensus and consent.

“Consensus means a decision is made when everyone agrees. Consent means a decision is made when no one objects.” —  SociocracyForAll.org

Consent is given on the basis of harm. If Billy wants to do something, and Jennifer has no justified cause for concern for any risk of harm, then Billy is free to take action.

How is consent obtained? By asking for objections. Ask collaborators to specify any risks they see in the proposal. Simple.

If objections exist, agree on what would need to be addressed in order to resolve the specified risk. Rinse and repeat until consent is reached on whether the proposal is worth pursuing according to its proposed positive impact vs any identified risks of harm.

Objections must be addressed explicitly within transparent documentation. Sometimes, achieving consent takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. So be it.

Clarifications

Controlled Autonomy

Communicate to consent on needs (dependencies and challenges to address) and resource allocations. Do not communicate to dictate solutions or tasks.

Note for Product Managers & Developers: This is somewhat akin to Agile best practice where product owners advise on problems to solve, for which developers choose their own solutions.

Appointments of Power

Distribution of decision making authority is not a right, it is a policy decision by those who control the resources and therefore ultimately decide on organizational strategy. Don’t like them? Leave them!

The degree of conflict in a team suggests the degree of willingness in the team to give up control, push personal agendas, or failure to seek authentic consent.

Meritocratic Innovation

The inherent argument for decentralizing organizations is that better quality decisions can be made within an organization at the point those decisions need to be actioned. This also encourages greater contributor engagement with a more fulfilling sense of empowerment.

Those most interested and capable of contribution will naturally emerge through the process of Phased Prioritization and Transparent Deliberation outlined above. This is the great experiment of modern organizational design as society heads towards a more civilized (respectful and harmonious) way of being.

Team Shapes

There are various models for how to group people for work. From autonomous Agile teams, to distinct circles, pods or guilds.

Spotify invented a creative model for matrix management which itself failed to implement and moved away from, although it lends itself well to the idea of criss-crossing accountabilities that we can glean from.

Here’s just one example article among many that help describe the Spotify Model.

In the Phased Prioritization model described above, team shapes are a secondary consideration. Start by defining work from AC to OC, and only then will it become practical and effective to begin shaping relevant teams.

Synergy Via Zero Organizations & Temporary Autonomous Consortiums (TAC’s)

In decades past, careers were for life. 

Today we might transition across career types multiple times.

In the future we may participate in many dozens… if not hundreds… of economic situations via smart-contracts that pay us for our contributions. 

Similar to freelance designers, writers, or developers who work independently and have dozens of clients over time. They are not considered as employees or staff in the traditional sense. They may be consultants, advisors, or providers. Often referred to as contractors.

Similarly, a Zero Organization exists only in the temporary nature of its associations between ‘contractors’ facilitated by smart-contracts, forged by meaningful relationships.

Each of us gaining capacity to discover, align, and participate in countless explorations or outcomes based on our values, interests, skills, and experiences.

Zero Organizations are temporary consortiums between autonomous individuals.

Temporary Autonomous Consortiums (TAC’s) exist only as long as the system requires and participants agree to mutual benefit. 

4 Elements Of TACtful Collaboration 

1. Prioritize Opportunities — Identify and align on what is important to stakeholders. This may start at the level of vision and values, and move towards milestones, gaps and challenges. It may include projects, strategic initiatives, gap analysis, contributor roles, policy requirements, and so on. 
2. Assign Accountabilities — Appoint accountability to contributors based on some measure of merit (ability, interest, reputation, responsibility, consensus vote, etc). 
3. Coordinate Contribution — Assigned agents are incentivized and supported as required to achieve their accountabilities. 
4. Reward Result — Based on the agreement set for success, results are measured and incentives are rewarded to contributors.

Easier said than done but through web3 dynamics we are learning fast. 

6 Principles For Incentivized Benevolence 

1. Empower decisions driven by experience, propensity, knowledge or skill: Meritocracy.
2. Support transparency and record keeping so that contributors can raise their profile as they increase their capacity for effective contribution: Reputation.
3. Enable and encourage collaborative open dialog to efficiently arrive at decisions through authenticity and integrity: Candor.
4. Compare options to make informed choices at every possible level of governance: Juxtaposition.
5. Encourage transparency to collect a wide variety of inputs from diverse sources: Inclusivity.
6. Remove bad actors so they gain no entry into our new world of abundance until they make reparations: Ostracism.

Introducing The Zero Organization

A Future Of Temporary Autonomous Consortiums

The Zero Organization has no boundaries in the traditional sense of company, corporate, or institutional structures.

These archaic edifices attempt to bound collaboration within legal frameworks, hierarchal management structures, with a redundant way of tracing value flows.

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All this becomes superseded by micro traceability of work contribution, as hierarchies become flat through distributed decision making, and cooperatives that span innumerable geographic boundaries become the norm.

Take Vitalik Buterin’s experimental ‘pop-up city’ concept Zuzalu (https://zuzalu.city) as example.

Or Burning Man.

Or hark back to Hakim Bey’s 1991 cypherpunk-esque treatise The Temporary Autonomous Zone (readable online). A cornucopia of ontological anarchism suggesting the impermanence of collaborative groups that band together for a specific purpose, goal, event, or experience.. and then disband having fulfilled its temporary purpose.

As data becomes ever-more present and utilized in decentralized protocols, each of us gain capacity to discover, align, and participate in countless explorations or outcomes based on our values, interests, skills, and experiences.

In decades past careers were set for life… while today we might transition across career types multiple times.

So to in the future, we may participate economically in many dozens… if not hundreds… of economic situations via smart-contracts that facilitate payment for contributions made.

The easiest analogy is to think of designers, writers, or developers who work independently and have dozens of clients over time.

They are not considered as employees or staff in the traditional sense, nor are they independent contributors. They may be consultants, advisors, or providers. Often referred to as contractors.

Similarly, The Zero Organization exists only in the temporary nature of its associations between ‘contractors’ facilitated by smart-contracts, assisted by AI, driven by data, forged by meaningful relationships.

Zero Organizations are consortiums between autonomous individuals.

Individuals with budgetary power within an economic engine of value creation and distribution. With decision making power and ownership of resource allocations, they include other individuals to participate in specific project areas to collaborate on mutual value creation. Associations last as long as the system and participants agree a mutual benefit.

Hence…

Temporary Autonomous Consortiums, or TACs.

This model extends today’s concept of a DAO; a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. A phrase that emerged around 2013 following Dan Larimer’s suggestion of a DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Company).

The collaborative zero-hierarchy management structures of DAO’s is still in its nascent stage of development, with various progress throughout the web3 sector.

Perhaps we will naturally see the borders and boundaries between one organization and another begin to fade, as work becomes entirely organized around the flexibility of individual autonomous contributors, rather than through the rigidity of pre-DAO centralized corporate structures.

This largely depends on futuristic data management that will allow greater filtering and matching between projects and passionate/capable parties, and the measurability of value flows, right down to the individual.

• On the individual level, see today’s cutting-edge personal knowledge management tools such as Heptabase to glimpse the future of sophisticated individual-centric workflow autonomy.
• On the group level, there are many experiments towards distributed collaborative synergy, perhaps towards this concept of The Zero Organization via Temporary Autonomous Consortiums.

Time will tell.

Invitation

If you would like to discuss any of this as part of an upcoming podcast series, contact the author, Gavriel Shaw, directly.

References

• Zuzalu pop-up city (The Zero City; Temporary Autonomous Cities) (https://zuzalu.city).
• The Temporary Autonomous Zone (readable online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism).
• Dan Larimer on The Decentralized Autonomous Company
• http://hypha.earth — an emerging network for collaborative decentralized organizations
• https://heptabase.com — a personal knowledge management application to build a ‘second brain’
• Zeroth-Principled Thinking by Bryan Johnson

Authors Related Articles (on LinkedIn)

• The Good, Bad, & Ugly Of Decentralized Community Growth + How To Apply Impactful Incentives For Liftoff
• Introducing DAOs-with-a-Twist: “Decentralized Agile Organizations”
• Key Interactions Founders & Senior Managers Must Account For Between Product, Marketing, and More
• How To Govern Your Self, Others, And The World (in web3)
• Governance In A Web3 World — 4 Principles For Creator Incentivized Network Effects

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Addendum: Personal Note

I have seen too many teams falter and fail due to common pitfalls and bizarre attitudes of control. Read and re-read the above method as you discover the nuanced relevance of each sentence.

Learn to hear one another. Learn to think more clearly. Learn to organize ideas better. Learn to coordinate with the unique energies that everyone brings to the table. Learn to see past your biases.

Synergy feels really, really good.