First-principles for decentrailizing organizations with Andrej Berlin

or was helpful in building flourishing businesses and promised Financial stability and significantly increased the quality of Our Lives try to nail down Who You Are for as long as possible your CV your salary your job title nobody believes your CV anyway the salary is melting away at 11 year over year a new job title designer engineer founder chief of happiness the does that even mean pen and paper were the foundational technologies that the infrastructure was built upon for the last couple of decades not really much has changed except we started using computers to forcefully try and hold on to exactly the same information about who you are but if you look at the biggest challenges of the 21st century especially in organizational design it's not so much about Who We Are but a lot about more about what we do we need better onboarding that is what is there to do in an organization of course there are Talent portals that connect faces with job titles and five-star reviews to a team but eventually it ends up ends up being the founder who does the screening for the culture fit or explains what there is to do we need better oops this thing is moving around a lot we need to unchain peer verified reputation also just thrown in a few buzzwords but that is a clear track record of what is what is it that you have done in the past and yes there are web 3 profiles that show you the token reputation tokens or web bounties but they don't tell you anything about your soft skills or the passion that you have for your work or the quality of your work in the context of the collective that you're contributing to and lastly we're all struggling with Fair wealth distribution which is how and why we value the things we do yes there are multi-cigs and token governance platforms that may speed up and make spending money easier but they don't actually help everybody feel fairly compensated or give contributors the opportunity to steer the organization in their Direction that that they resonate with by doing high quality work so it seems like we need to shift our perspectives from our roles who we are our Twitter profiles our bank accounts towards what are the things that we do our actions our functions our workflows and I want to be clear I don't have any investors I'm not trying to sell you a magical tool that will turn your company into a Dao and most importantly I'm not trying to invent anything new human organization has been around for at least six thousand years centralized decentralized both at the same time my friends Michael zargum and Kelsey nabin have done an excellent ethnographic research on that topic especially in the Dow space really great work political ideologies like democracy communism capitalism sociocracy company structures from Apple valve Google Zappos they're all amazing historical references all you need to know is already there for free look every organization has a particular purpose for Apple for example it was something like bringing computers into everybody's home nowadays it could be something more interesting like extending human lifespan or we also know of sending people to Mars every organization has teams that contribute with a particular mission to that vision which could be something like you know for Apple that would be building a computer or building the actual software or like the user interface design and if you are part of one of those teams or if you have a function within that team then your function has a purpose and being able to make that connection is essentially what we call meaningful work and if we can clearly articulate that and publicly share that then you won't ever have to look for talent to work with you it will just naturally attract the best people of course before you start with an organization you have to do actually the work so think about what it is that you do why are you doing it what are the goals what are the things that can go wrong oh yeah by the way this is also sorry for the QR code bingo I know this is probably on every single presentation but that's actually a workshop template that you can use with your team to also kind of arrive at these um Mission Vision purpose I think it's actually the guideline for an entire facilitation um so yeah think about the goals the things that can go wrong with your function the try to actually break down and write exactly how the workflow of your function or of your work progresses that is then a clear record of what you're doing that can be used as a basis for negotiation with anyone without involving ego because it is about what it is that you do and not about who you are and if you can be transparent about it then people will also gravitate around your work because they will understand that you're just being honest about everything and if you don't know or if you have if you struggle writing these things down just let someone else observe you or you can also talk to Google meet transcribe your thing transcribe your description put it into jet DPT and ask GPT to just create a workflow here's a couple of references um there will be only a few more QR codes and you don't have to photograph every single one with them but here's just a couple of references that we did for a couple of other companies like I think Aragon or primeau um uh or also deep work but just that gives you an example of how these Works flows look now once you have that articulated then you can start assigning value to these functions how do they relate to each other how much value does it bring a company to execute a particular function over the course of a month that is the Fiat compensation how much value does it bring to have that function over the long term that could be the governance weight and before you start jumping to tokenizing and quantifying the um the functions with tokens or with with any numbers remember that we're all humans and we have feelings and we need to talk about them and we need to make Fair agreements and just as a slight tangent the constructive conversations on the basis of these written down functions actually make it possible for everybody to feel fairly paid it's called self-governance and even if it doesn't allow for everybody always finding this is a bit sorry for the gray thing um it says preference even if you don't always end up with the preferred decision for everybody having these this discourse the conversations will at least help you find an overlap of the desired range of preference so that everybody feels included in the decision making process which you don't have with direct democracy and of course one-on-one conversations are really hard to scale I know we're have like larger communities so I'm not expecting to have everybody just talk to each other on one-on-one and make these decisions decisions but you can actually use design thinking workshops like the one that I linked with the Mission Vision purpose board that will help you get a team together and do what most companies and I've done a lot of research on this do or let's say teams do within four months on discourse with proposals and comment in in a two-hour session because you just involve people in a constructive design thinking process that is extremely fast and ends up including everybody's opinion and especially agreement now once you have that as a once you've written down all the functions everything like all the purpose of all the teams and all the organization then you have kind of a snapshot this is how your organization looks right now but of course over time the organizational evolves and you need to adapt to changing environments and individuals need to also keep track of their goals and make smaller adjustments in what they are planning and people don't really like to vote so one of the tools that I recommend employing is just frequent feedback loops allow people to meet regularly to actually discuss whether the whether they're still in agreement on all of the work that actually needs to be done all the goals that need to be achieved Town Halls are a great example for that also not necessarily A New Concept and finally if you want to scale as an organization or a team but you don't want to spend your lifetime hiring or let's say you're fed up with your function and you want to move on with your life and do something else if you have spent time designing your function so that you fall in love with it then other people will fall in love with it too find someone who is also interested in the same working conditions and teach them and working conditions doesn't have to mean the same Fair the same monetary compensation could also be things like intangible things like is it a social function is it a more technical function is it a like is it recurring on a frequent basis or is it just a discreet thing that project that comes up every now and then um so please don't delegate work that you don't like because that only makes that that doesn't let that doesn't make anyone grow nobody benefits from that and remember these functions are also your record of the record of your reputation so not only can you see what you have done in the past and you'll see what would happen if you pushed yourself just a little harder but it also helps other people see what have you done in the past what were you good at what are you doing right now and what is your potential in the future maybe if you collaborate with with them so I want to finish up um don't do slides on on as a PDF I want to finish this quick rant with uh and a tangible example and just show you how you can create an organization pretty much right here right now so think about any activity that you really like something that you just like doing and think about it maybe as a combination of a verb and a noun I mean a verb itself would also be fine and if you have a few things just select the one that you feel like benefits other people the most do you have one okay design design Brands okay awesome so isn't it so this is pretty nice isn't it great to know that just by being you you're already creating value for other people nobody has to convince you of designing brands for others so if you want someone who's really good at designing Brands there you go let's take another one do you have one research great amazing now assuming that you would do that on a frequent basis in maybe some project you're constantly getting better at your process I don't know if you're actually doing that but you could also write down your learnings over the course of time and then improve your own process and you're getting better and better at it okay let's let's have another one could you name one cattle ranging amazing okay so this is very this is very funny so so and it's also kind of shows you how much potential there is in the in future organizations because all an organization is is the three of you looking at each other's functions or at least for now like trusting each other you can do them well and finding creative ways to combine these functions and these activities into solutions that will solve higher order problems and and at least in my experience these this work these these functions is is what are the first principles of decentralizing organizations I I can't imagine how it would look if we started to uncover all of these things that we all do and started honestly talking about how we work together we could significantly improve our financial and emotional stability or organization resilience and probably exponentially increase the quality of Our Lives communities could grow much better if they stop focusing on who we people are but rather focused on solving problems with our skills I wonder how much potential there is still to uncover oh I I mentioned I we had the workshop in Barcelona uh there's a really it's actually very simple to do that yourself um in Barcelona we had a team of I think 10 people they haven't met before but they all realized that the conference event was missing a network networking opportunity and within two hours within two hours exactly with the same process they came up with a networking event they came up with they surfaced what they were best at individually one of the people made apps another one was a great moderator another one was just a runner and I think two or three hours later they built the entire networking event from from scratch they haven't met before 50 people showed up and said it was the best thing they've seen at the entire conference so and and the process is simple you write down the problems you come up with Solutions and then you write down what everybody thinks they can contribute with what function to that that is the start of an emerging organization just as a final note I want to uh thank everybody from Deep work and everybody who is related to deep work who contributed to building software or doing awareness or working on product design on any of the verticals um it's it's a pleasure to work with everybody and it gives also in that context my life meaning um and with these tools here's a lot of stuff that you can refer to all of the examples all past projects there's basically a breakdown of how an entire organization Works to the kind of Last Detail also documentation of all the functions um and now it's your turn thanks ladies [Music]