Decentralization without chaos: How DAOs (and every other org) can effectively decentralize with Meg

and I'm super psyched to hopefully get the slides working and talk to you all for a couple minutes about how we can demystify oh we got slides thank you so much to the team you guys are awesome okay so this is my face um and again what we're going to do today we're gonna make decentralization less scary so again whether you've been deep in Dows for a couple years like me or you just wandered over to the community stage and you're like what the heck is a dow anyway decentralization sounds weird We're Gonna Come Away with something that's practical and actionable for you and whatever stage your organization is at all right and so first things first elephant in the room dowels have gotten a little crazy over the last couple of years I was in a DOW Event on Tuesday someone stood up on a panel and said guys have been really bad for the last six months and we all looked at each other and we're like yeah yeah um and so despite this yeah we're super early we're trying to do something really crazy and it's a little bit messy um and some of this mess has led people to say oh maybe this decentralization thing can't work it's too chaotic it's too inefficient what we really need is a return to centralized systems but centralization is not the answer there's no system that's been proven to be less creative less resilient more prone to corruption and abuses of power than centralized systems and really the job we've got in front of us is to make decentralization work better and we know it can work there are examples all around us as far out as science and nature jellyfish and bee colonies Politics the 1970s women's movement and businesses mandragon Spain's seventh largest business that has been operating as a worker-owned cooperative for the last 70 years and household names Patagonia Bob's Road Mill taking major strides towards decentralization in their organization and management practices and so we know two things from this we know one decentralization is a spectrum you're the person who picks the right part on that Spectrum for your organization and two decentralization can work and so what is decentralization what does it look like when it's effective in the examples we just looked at effective decentralization separates ownership and control so in centralized systems you've got a small group or even one individual who both owns and controls the majority of the organization even if it's a public company where theoretically anybody can buy stock in practice there's a small group of people who reap the profits and the benefits that that organization's success and control the direction in the decision making when we effectively decentralize we share Collective ownership not just financially but of the strategy and the vision of this organization Dallas have probably gotten about 50 percent there on this we'll talk about that in a little bit and on control we hand off control to the builders who are building Dows have probably gone a hundred and fifty percent in on this and maybe we've gotten a little bit too crazy so we're going to talk about the right structure to enable amazing outcomes for the individual Builders who are in control of their outcomes all right so chaos reason number one I'm going to talk about two main reasons that we see chaos in decentralized organization and the first one is that we've only gone 50 in on this ownership piece we see this show up in Dallas for example I worked in a defy down where half of the contributors thought that we were building products for whales half of them thought we were building for retail and then there were a couple people who were like oh no we're building for institutions and so you can see how this creates a little bit of dissonance a little bit of misalignment and actually a whole lot of chaos and bad decisions and so the way that we lead forward with this is we build a collective vision for our decentralized organization the bar for a vision in a decentralized organization is actually a lot higher than we see in centralized organizations we're used to a leader kind of coming down from on high and they say something like super inspirational and a little bit vague like we're going to give the World a Coke amazing great how do I use that to make decisions when we're in decentralized organizations we create visions that have three parts first is a future State what's the world going to look like if we're successful what are our motivations for changing the world the second is our Target Community again who are we building for is it the whales the retail the institutions we've all got to agree we've got to name them we've got to know them and we've got to integrate them into all of our practices and decision making third and finally is how we win what are our competitive advantages what are the values the behaviors and the opportunities that we continue to invest in in order to succeed when I gave you guys a quick example of how we brought this to life in metric style so metric Style again on-demand analytics service down and we are going to change the world by providing the framework that any Data Insights can be delivered and verified on demand we know that data is the lifeblood of web3 and when we do this well web3 succeeds and grows and we all know that's going to change the world second is our Target Community we're for analysts of all skill levels and what we're also saying there is we're not for not analysts not for engineers we're not for data scientists we're not for marketers we're for the analysts and on the other side of the marketplace in order to achieve our vision we've got to make it super simple for literally anybody to show up and ask a question and we win again by investing in educating in those analysts and making it possible through game changing technology for anybody to show up with any level of context or education ask a data question and get it answered building the vision in decentralized organizations is also a little bit different than in centralized organizations there is no anointed figure who goes into a dark room on high it's a build and public process the first thing you'll want to do is appoint a facilitator small group of facilitators who should be representative of all of the different populations in your organization so not just your contributors or your community but your contributors your community your investors anybody who's interested and touches your Dow should have a place in this process you want to understand their motivations build in public with them constantly surface your research integrate their feedback and most importantly socialize and repeat this Vision again and again celebrate when people accomplish it all right so we talked about the first reason for chaos now we're on to the second reason we talked about individual control being something that Dows have gone 150 percent in on it's actually really admirable it's really hard to give up control and some of the ways that this gets chaotic or let's say we've got a Dao who says hey I need a new website and we've got a super talented website builder in the community who shows up raises their hand and says hey I'll build you a website and it's like amazing we've got access to the best talent who's able to work in this like super flexible way who's excited about the project where this can get a little chaotic is say the Dow had in mind like a home page a two-week turnaround time a 5k budget and the contributor was like oh this is going to be a 10-page website we're going to have token gated pages eight weeks 50k whoa we're headed for some chaos the way to solve this is actually let's back away from the project itself and focus on the problems that we're solving together so it's not necessarily a home page or 10 token gated pages so what are we trying to do are we creating content for contributors and community members to access or are we repositioning our brand for the broader ecosystem answering and framing these problems and giving Builders the right structure enables them to succeed the first step in giving them some structure is to name a project or product manager or facilitator my most unpopular opinion in web3 is we need a lot more product managers because good product managers help other people build well they own problems and they connect Builders with the context and resources they need to succeed and so here we name a problem owner who's got a product mindset even if they're not working on product they're giving others feedback and context sharing proposals commenting on forums bringing people into the conversation and they're engaging the community with the right structure and so it's not just hey we need to reposition our brand on the home page you know blah blah blah budget timeline so here's the context you need to be successful these are the people you need to talk to these are the skills you're going to need to bring to the table in order to be successful another real-life example of how we brought this into metrics down we have a ton of talented analysts who are showing up and we noticed that they were actually only working on a few things if they started working on polygon challenges for example they only worked on polygon challenges we're like hey we have so many cool data challenges across so many different blockchains and protocols what's going on here so the first thing we did is we asked two facilitators amazing people Aaron and Vita up on the screen and said can you go figure out what's going on here they came back and said hey there's actually a huge learning curve for these analysts when they jump in between different protocols let alone different blockchains let alone different data platforms they're facing a new learning curve every time and they're totally siled they're doing it all by themselves and um actually what we need to do is provide some group mentorship and education and so they leveraged experts from within the community on these different topics to create peer-driven mentorship groups and it's really actually double participation and created a ton of great learning and enthusiasm in the Dow which I say not to tell you that like we've solved the problem and we've gotten it all right for us and every other organization regularly re-evaluating everything from the facilitator role the priority of the problem your budget your kpis and being open to every kind of regular feedback is super important all right so we've gone through a lot this morning um and I hope that we've kind of demystified decentralization for a few of you or brought a new lens um into a problem that you've been deep in for a long time so first things first if you walk away with nothing else whether you've been deep in Dows for two years or you just heard the word yesterday I want us to understand decentralization can work there's a right recipe and a ripe formula for decentralization for your organization wherever you're at and there are two important things for us to keep in mind when we're solving for this one is that Collective Vision all on the same page we've got to build it say it live it reward it two is setting the right structure of expectations for setting up the right forms of individual control and with that let's go forth and decentralize we've got a ton of amazing talks up today and I think we're out of time we are out of time but if you want to talk any more about this or chat you can find me on my incredibly creative social handles or around thanks [Applause] [Music]