Decentralizing Leadership: Mojo over Ego with Lisa Wocken

we often talk about is this idea that in the space of web3 and in particular Dows or decentralized autonomous organizations that we have code at the center and humans at the edges this idea that we're going to have Automation and code really drive the future of our organizations forward and it's really up to us as humans to Simply nudge it along this is something that comes from open source development it also comes from a paper from vitalik really formalizing this notion of what a Dao is truly with automation at the center and yet what we found is that this actually can do us a real disservice because when we look at humans being at the edges we tend to ignore the fact that we actually really need to cultivate great leadership and develop human beings for this more decentralized future of work my name is Lisa woken and I'm so thrilled to be with you here today to talk about decentralizing leadership and this concept of leading with Mojo over ego my role within this whole beautiful web3 world is a researcher over at Talent Dow we are a Dao that focuses on doing scientifically rigorous and relevant research across the Dow ecosystem as a dow ourselves to help all Dows thrive and then I'm also an educator across the ecosystem and have spent the last 15 years of my career in web 2 and large organizations really striving to help develop leaders for the brave bold future so why study though this idea of leadership well I think we know there's been plenty of headlines plenty of reasons over the last year that we can see leadership has an impact it's what's making or breaking a lot of our organizations it's why some Dows are doing well why some are not it's why certain people outside of web 3 have a particular impression of what it means to be a part of web3 and so we know cultivating great leadership matters and we know it's worth studying because it is a little bit different it's at this convergence of all these unique contextual factors this idea of permissionlessness this idea of pseudonymous culture and what it means to really have composable or cross-pollinating as part of the fabric of how our organizations work and thrive and you'll see this lovely quote from Gloria get coin Dao you'll hear a number of voices represented in this presentation all of which we interviewed for part of our study but this idea that leadership endows can come in a lot of different ways where people's voices can be heard where it's creating clarity but most importantly this idea that Dows are about having a structure that allows for a lot of this to happen even more so than the individual person and so what did we do to explore this question we really thought about deeply how do we develop stronger leaders across the Dao ecosystem and why dows so Dows in particular are a really unique case if you think back to the 1990s there was this concept really Brewing of this idea of design thinking and even though there were a lot of different predecessors that came before and that really made up this notion of design thinking it was this idea of product development in a much more iterative playful prototyping get close to the consumer listen learn and iterate and that whole notion wasn't invented by Design thinking but design thinking really packaged it nicely there was a company called Ideo that really became more known for it in Silicon Valley was this like kind of foundational area where Innovation was spurring up and then what happened was other people started paying attention and you'd see these like heads of innovation coming to learn about this new Innovative process of design thinking this new way of Designing products and processes and then what ultimately happened is people realized like this isn't just for the Innovation teams this is for everybody like we can test learn iterate in all these various Pockets not just for the highly Innovative but for any organization and even areas where they didn't adopt the end-to-end design thinking process for product development they did adopt a lot of the ethos a lot of the ideas behind it and that to me is exactly why Dows are such a unique area to study and to work in because to me they are the playground and the sandbox they're at that Ideo Silicon Valley Stage of all these new ways of thinking and working testing out at hyper Pace governance structures tokenomics and all the convergence of what's making us a new and different culture to work in and so that's why I'm so thrilled to share with you some of the research we've spent at Talent Dow the last year focusing on building on what it means to decentralize leadership particularly focused on the Dow ecosystem so phase one was really leaning into rigor any great researcher gets really geeky and nerdy and is like hey let's not start from scratch let's see what's already out there and that's precisely what we did I partnered with a researcher who specializes in researching on research and one of the things that we did was we went very deep and did a systematic review of meta-analyzes there's about 40 different studies that represented 5400 primary studies focused on shared Collective and distributed leadership over the past 25 years this was done at a variety of different organizations representing over a hundred thousand people and so we believe it's very generalizable even to the Dow ecosystem as unique as we might think we are we know that a lot of these insights still hold up so what exactly did we find I'll tell you very soon all right so what we found is that there are some leadership behaviors that really do Drive Great organizational and group outcomes and they're not worth throwing out these these hold up in the beautiful decentralized world and we might use different language to describe them which I'll get to later on but these really do matter and they're often bucketed in this notion of people task oh they have a sweet little dog outside so if you've lost your dog please please go get it it probably really misses you okay so back to leadership one of the things that we found is that we can really bucket or categorize leadership into three primary areas of people change and task and then of course at the very center of all of it and especially having been in this space for for quite a long time the Inside Out approach is what matters you do the inner works you can do the better outer work and so that's why we always start with self-leadership any development program will always start there and so there's all these different behaviors that we know still matter in web3 yes we still need to be friendly and open to other people's input and yes we actually do want to be Thinking Beyond traditional Norms we want to push the bounds and also when it comes to tasks it matters to clarify responsibilities and performance and also to actually monitor it which oftentimes in web 3 we get that big surge at the beginning and then tend not to follow up or monitor nearly as well and so what I'd like to do though is for anybody that's interested in working in the space that believes in the decentralized future is to summarize this into three different actions you can be thinking about and that's when it comes to people appreciation is key I tell people appreciate to accelerate like if you're looking for results if you're looking for people to move mountains and that's really often what we're trying to do here in web 3 is move mountains quickly appreciation goes an incredibly long way and then when it comes to change it's still about imagination we're running bold and quickly into the future and yet we're not always helping bring people along and so we need to be clarifying to people what that bright bold image is that we have in our minds about where we're headed that's what will bring them along see the possibility and not just see the headlines of you know some of the darker stories of the past year show them the vision that we have and why we build in this space and then the last thing is when it comes to task leadership this notion of clarification sometimes in Dows it's very nebulous we're not always clear on what's expected because in this Brave bold world of Dao's we say that there are no bosses nobody's going to tell you what to do and yet we believe it's still really important to have work agreements And to clarify what's happening and what are we doing right now that we can commit to and then the other part that came from our deep literature review is this notion of what your core team can say yes to we found through our research that there's actually three prerequisites to shared leadership even emerging and so this these are like the entry yeses that we want your core team to be able to say in order for you to have a culture where shared leadership will emerge where people will step up and take initiative to do what's needed in order to move the work of the organization forward and that's shared purpose does your group know where you're going and how to get there social support if you were in need do you know that somebody is there to lend a hand and then lastly voice do you have the ability to influence directions and actions do you have a say so this brings us then to concluding what we did was looking at building off of 25 years of great history to saying yes but this is a unique space and I'm a firm believer in this body of work called social constructionism and it really believes in this idea of words create worlds and so when it comes down to it we need to study this idea of leadership From Within These decentralized autonomous organizations and that's really where phase two comes in we go from rigor to also meeting it with relevance and what we did over the last six months was we conducted one grounded Theory study and what that basically means is using the words and doing in-depth intense interviews with 23 people on their ideas about leading in the space and then some of the places that were represented are some of the leading Dows that we have in the web3 ecosystem some that have been around the longest like maker when we look at the Dow ecosystem we view it as being six years old roughly if we can even say it was an ecosystem six years ago but we also have all these wonderful different Dows represented in our study and we were privileged to have so many people being willing to contribute their time attention and energy and so who were these amazing people um they were a gender balance Group which was by design that did not happen um on accident in fact almost all the referrals that we got were for men our team had to intentionally ask for women so for anyone doing studies or inquiring about conducting research in the space please keep in mind that we want our research results to reflect the world we want to live in also we had a wonderful range of Ages from 19 to 50. we found ourselves with a group that was primarily Caucasian and Hispanic residing in nine countries and coming from 11 and yet we didn't know any of this data when we first asked for volunteers because we really really really did live by the pseudonymous culture we didn't know who we were talking to in fact sometimes all we had was a pfp and the interviewees had an option of whether they showed themselves or whether they were just a voice throughout the interview process okay so what is leadership endows I don't think we're going to come to an agreement on one definition of leadership but again this is about unearthing and Illuminating and so I'll share with you what we heard from some of our amazing participants about how they're experiencing this leadership is often experienced as a multifaceted concept and so what you'll see here is I love this quote I think it represents a great insight into personal leadership of ultimately it's about somebody stepping up to what their excellent or world class at that provides a lot of value for the Dao we also look at leadership through a relational lens and this is about providing courage and clarity so people know how they can actually act within the community and then lastly this Frame of organizational that leadership is about enabling work teams to be autonomous and productive and notice a lot of these responses are not job titles they're not positions they're not a status it's about activities that we're engaging in to remove the work of the Dow forward so you'll see here some other activities that we engage in when we're leading in Dao's and that's helping the group navigate influencing Direction providing a framework and vision and not created by payer position but really about time reputation and people's willingness to value your opinions and so when are you actually leading what actually happens you know we ask the question of how people first came to adao and they gave us almost this prototypical journey that it seemed like most people entered into when they came into this space and I'd encourage you to reflect on where you're at in your own personal Journey with learning about web3 or learning about Dows or navigating the more decentralized future of work but people would come into Dao's and essentially start learning they would be thrown into the deep end they would open a wallet they would get their first nft they would start realizing whoa this is pretty amazing they start becoming unblind to the centralization bent of the world and once they see the possibility for decentralization it's really hard for them to go back and so what happens is they see all these possibilities but then inevitably in a lot of things that are new and exciting and fresh we tend to be a little bit idealistic and then it Dawns on us that we have limitations these organizations have limitations the tooling isn't what we want it to be it's not as smooth of a user experience as we'd like it to be and we ourselves are getting burnt out we have fomo we have fud we have all these things that keep us from really keeping that idealistic Vision alive in our hearts and in our actions and so some of us dip into the space where maybe we need a sabbatical from Dao's maybe we need just a total break maybe we need to leave and come back as an Anon in another Dao which has happened this is something that we realize then people start finding their groove at some point they start practicing greater selection they start prioritizing themselves what's important on their own personal journey and purpose and they start really moving things forward in a way that feels much more congruent for them they find their people they find their purpose and they find a little bit more happiness too as they function in the space so the goal of developing leaders and decentralizing Leadership is really about giving people greater awareness helping them build context and allowing them to practice discernment more in the space so that way they can more quickly find themselves once they hit limitations to getting over to that space of practicing selection but it's very hard to do that if you don't have the information or the Insight or the context to discern for yourself and so we asked people along this journey that they've been on when did they first feel like they started learning like was there a certain point in that Journey that yes that's when I'm leading and the truth is anywhere along that path you can begin leading leadership is not a point in time and you'll see here the quote from Grendel it's not a specific moment it's a more of a emergent and dynamic process that you step into and so I love this quote from Humpty too it's like when people started to trust that I would make sound decisions or I was leading when I stopped thinking I was dumb Olivia shared and I think there's some moment where you start coming into terms with the fact that I'm moving the work of this place forward I have influence I have impact and I'm trusting myself more in this space and so this brings us to this idea of it really is about yes there's other people who might validate your existence or your influence in the space but it's also about you honing in on that internal compass that idea of I'm pursuing developing myself and this is impacting all the things that I'm doing I'm doing the outer work or the inner work so that way I can do the better outer work and a lot of what was shared when we asked for what are the pitfalls along this journey of leading in the space a lot of what was shared was this notion of ego this ability to set aside your ego to realize that you yourself can become a central point of failure in a system and that when you do things well you're actually amassing power and authority and great leaders in the space right now they're working intentionally to redistribute that Authority to help others get context they were mentored into the space now they're mentoring other people so how do you become a part of the system and that does require setting aside some ego I talk with a lot of startup Founders and do incubator programs of people deciding a dow or a traditional startup and a lot of it is you need to be a little bit willing to relinquish the strength of your vision in order for other people to influence it and impact it and shape it with you so that brings us to this notion of Mojo over ego it's about knowing yourself knowing your strengths and coming boldly with your asks and offers this becomes so very important because we're not asking you to come in Meek we want you to be humble we want you to be open But ultimately we want you to know yourself and we want you to come with all of your badass talent and say this is how I think I can contribute to the space so many Dows are actually worried that they have a lack of leadership that we're so concerned about committeeifying things and being decentralized that no one's actually pulling the Fuller body forward so we need leadership we want leadership we're asking for leadership and it just takes somebody with courage and conviction to step into that space But then also to be willing to be open to others feedback and to be influenced themselves and that requires also on our own personal Journeys to make sure we're not our own personal point of failure that other people can help us along can help us get to that better result by us having social support we heard from so many of our interviews people say that their best learning and their development of their own leadership came from peer relationships it came from an experienced Mentor in the space many many actually had coaches and therapists and could not recommend them more highly for people and it makes sense it makes sense you're not coming into a more boxed organization that'll tell you when to attend the three-day training on how to be a better person this is a space where your own personal purpose and journey actually matters more because that's exactly why people are choosing to contribute to certain Dows or certain organizations in this space it's because they feel that alignment that resonance and if they didn't they would move on they would move on and so I encourage you to think about where do you maybe have an empty slot where maybe would you benefit from bolstering and building your own network in the space so if Mojo over ego is the mindset social support is what's going to keep us going and thriving and learning and growing having clarifying conversations is where I want to encourage you to take this at the organizational level there's a lot of conversations that aren't being had that need to be had and I think many people feel like they don't know how to enter into those and it's because leadership is this thing that happens at all these different levels it happens at the ecosystem level the community level we're having conversations at all these different spaces and yet small teams are really what's driving a lot of web3 forward it's a group of like two to four people really making the difference and so start there start with your small team and have conversations as basic and simple as writing on a sheet of paper a lovely line and saying decentralized centralized I don't know one Dao that doesn't say they're committed to Progressive decentralization but also almost all Dao's started like traditional startups with a very centralized structure and that's actually okay that's okay to set up the Dao with more centralized leadership but don't lose sight of progressive decentralization just being a poster plug it needs to be an ongoing conversation where you say where are we now and where do we want to be in a matter of a few weeks a few months a year and how are we going to close that Gap how are we planning to actually get there and to continually then check in on it and it doesn't have to be decentralization or centralization but whatever is most meaningful that's most important to the values of your organization that should be talked about regularly it should be a living conversation and so here's the next steps I'd encourage of each of you one is to prioritize yourself Pancho my fellow researcher and I spent so many hours pouring over these transcripts we coded every single line looking for action words then coded those codes all to get to these simple summaries and yet one thing was really clear a lot of people are burnt out totally burnt out and sometimes burnt to a crisp where they leave the space all together and that's absolutely something that we need to curtail and so I encourage people all the time and we actually had Gloria encourage people on a panel a couple days ago at Dow Denver to do something for yourself today and I thought that was such Sage advice so even if it's just a little thing please prioritize yourself in a small way if not really big ways every single day and then reflect on your personal purpose like I said it's it's different than traditional organizations you actually do need to know yourself more intimately know your purpose know why you're here why you're building in the space why you're doing things in the space because that does dictate your journey and help you navigate through the space no one's going to tell you what that purpose is and what you're here to accomplish you need to figure that out yourself and then of course building a network of social support to help you with that practice Mojo over ego by just simply asking more questions today think about yesterday even how many questions did you ask who did you ask them of what were the responses how'd you feel after just do a little bit more today a little bit more questions and then of course engage in more clarifying conversations with your organization so you'll notice the beautiful art it's my husband actually who designed it and one of the things that I love is this notion of lighthouses we often say that Dows are flat dolls have not found themselves as flat yet and even when we say code at the center humans at the edges it is painfully clear that humans are still very much so at the center of this and it's actually okay that the terrain's not flat that there's these little Hills we're just trying to avoid the giant pyramids and so what we're really looking at when it comes to leading in the decentralized world is this idea that we want to illuminate the past so that way other people can navigate it more safely so that we can all make decisions that we need to make for our own personal Journeys in a way that makes the world and ourselves better at the same time and so with that being said if you scan this QR code what you're going to get is the perspectives the stories the interpretations and the rich contextual detail from these 23 extraordinary human beings that we had the privilege of sitting down with talking for an hour of what it's like to be in this space if you're just considering entering into the space if you're deeply into the space I think this is extremely valuable Insight it's been a treasure Trove of inspiration for us and I cannot encourage you more to check it out so thank you all so very much for spending the time here today and I'm Lisa Wilkin I'll be here afterward for questions thank you [Applause] thank you