15min chapter

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Episode 012 - Patterns for Decentralized Organizing with Richard Bartlett of The Hum

The Ownership Economy

CHAPTER

Challenges and Tools for Decentralized Organizing

This chapter explores the challenges faced by decentralized organizations and introduces the concept of 'Patterns for Decentralized Organizing' as a guide to tackle these challenges. It emphasizes the importance of trust, respect, and relationship-building, and discusses the shift from domination models to partnership models. The chapter also delves into the cultural and psychological aspects of organizing and the need for internal change to support decentralized organizations.

00:00
Speaker 1
And so if you're going to reject the traditional hierarchy and go a different way, you're going to have to do a lot of R&D, you're going to have to figure you're going to basically encounter a lot of challenges along the way, like, you know, how do you do decisions without spending hours and hours and hours on the most mundane stuff? And where does accountability come from if you don't have a boss that is can threaten you with punishment, you know, those are real difficult questions in my travels were encountering lots of decentralized groups, I found them all, like we did with Lumio, like, I will throw out everything about organizing and say everyone in the past was wrong, we're going to invent everything from scratch. The problem with inventing everything from scratch is that there's a whole bunch of organizing challenges, which each any one of them is big enough to completely destroy your enterprise. Like, if you don't have accountability, or if you don't know how to make decisions, or if you can't manage conflict, or if you can't manage your cash flow, like, there's a bunch of these topics that if you don't get it right, you've got to die, your organization's going to die. So innovating on all fronts simultaneously is not very likely to succeed. And so what I was trying to do with my book, Patterns for Decentralized Organizing, is to say, look, these are sort of like the top 10 challenges that all decentralized organizations face. And these are some of the things you can do about it. And I can't prescribe to you exactly like, you should just do this, you know, you should just structure your organization in this way. But these are the kind of the tools and the practices and the frameworks, you know, like the mental models that have made a difference for other organizations, you can try them out. So on that question about engagement and people were like wanting to work, absolutely, when people have a lot of autonomy and agency, and when they are connected to a sense of purpose, when they have a sense of belonging with their teammates, like, the problem is how do you get them to stop working, because they burn out, it's not how do I engage my workforce or something, you know. And we see this at the moment, completely across the whole, across the board on web3, is everyone is just like, way overdoing it, because they've got so much passion and so much autonomy, and they feel such a sense of responsibility, and a sense of friendship and solidarity with other people in the movement. It's just like, we're going, we're going, we're going. So that's not really the problem anymore. It's like, how do you channel that energy in a way that's constructive and useful and sustainable, and that's where you need, yeah, like, you might not have a manager, but you still need to do some kind of management. You know, there still needs to be some structures and policies in place. You need to have some system for noticing what's working and what's not working and being able to change, you know, like to be conscious about what your processes currently are and how you can improve them. And I mean, to get to the principles part, I think where I've landed is basically that, I guess one piece, this kind of maybe two, one piece is prioritise the vibe, like vibes is king or queen, monarch, meaning the social fabric, the sense of connection, the sense of belonging and purpose, that is the thing that you can't do without. Like, you can run out of money, you can completely miss your product market fit, you can have a really difficult conflict or severe disagreements and all that sort of thing. But once you run out of trust, and once you run out of respect for each other, like, you're dead in the water, there's no coming back from that. And so the priority is how do we look after our relationships? How do we create working culture that feels awesome where people are respected and they know they're going to be taken care of? And if you prioritise that, then I believe that really good work happens as a result. So that's the first principle, prioritise the vibe. And then the second principle is just to iterate a lot. And not just like people are familiar with this and start up land of like, you do like agile product development. And so you make a rough prototype, and then you show it to some customers, and then you improve it a bit, and then you just keep looping and looping. It's basically applying that process to your organisational design, and saying like, okay, for the next month, we're going to do decisions in this way. And then at the end of the month, we're going to stop and review and iterate and say, well, what did we learn from that? And what's a little tweak that we could do for the next iteration? And when you have the first principle of like good relationships, and like a lot of trust and a sense of safety, where people are going to be transparent with each other, they're actually going to communicate with candor. And then you run these iterative loops on how can we improve our ways of organising? Pretty quickly, you get into a self-correcting evolutionary pathway, you know, where the group can just kind of adjust its posture to meet whatever the challenges of the day. And it has just incredible resilience and flexibility. So like in our organisation at Limeo, there was a point where, you know, funding fell through, and we ran out of budget, and we're looking around the room going, we can't pay everyone anymore. And because we have this really high quality relationships and a transparent process for dealing with whatever challenges come our way, basically the outcome of that moment was a bunch of us agreed transparently and consensually to not get paid for a while. Another group decided to like drop their wages so they could afford to keep someone else on so that we all shared the limited resource. It's like when everyone is engaged in this sense of, they have a sense of ownership, and in our case, they actually legally do have ownership. The amount of creativity and flexibility that comes in as a result is really incredible. So yeah, those are the two pieces, and I don't know if that is useful or if that's so abstract that we need to drop down another level.
Speaker 3
No, I think there's two things that came out of it for me. I mean, there's actually been good quantitative work that kind of reiterates or highlights what you chose, or underscores what you just said around resilience in times of crisis for people that are working in cooperatives. So cooperatives actually go through recessions at a higher success rate. They're more likely to survive in the first five years of business and traditional startups. And so there might be a narrow ban to their success, but in times of crisis and also in the early days when you're trying to get the product market fit and trying to get customers to actually adopt whatever you're working on, they are more likely to survive. And so I think that that quantitative work, and we'll share some papers for people that are interested, actually underscores some of the qualitative stuff that you're saying and the design patterns that you've highlighted and actually written about fairly extensively. I guess one of the questions that comes up for me is, it's funny, you know, like I don't, I had the opportunity to meditate with this guy who is phenomenal. A kinship, you know, he's the Swiss German guy, and I hesitate to even bring it up because I'm just not meditating these days and wish I was doing more of it. But one of the things that always sticks in my mind about what he says is, you know, humans don't scale very well, and our institutions don't scale very well. And I'm just wondering, when I hear you, I kind of go back to, you know, sitting in the in the song and hearing a kinship speak in a couple of ways. And I was just wondering, does the work that you're doing
Speaker 1
scale? Yes, it's just a different scaling model than we're familiar with. So one of the frameworks that has really helped my way of thinking is this idea of the partnership and domination spectrum from Leon Isla. And it's this idea that, like, it's an oversimplification, right? But it kind of says any human relationship, either between peers or like between countries, you know, at any scale. It can either, you can relate to someone as a partner or in the sort of domination submission relationship. So it's like either horizontal or vertical and into spectrum. So you can be more or less, you know, you can be like a little bit domineering or like a complete fascist, right? So there's a spectrum of options there. I think the vast majority of organizations that we see visibly through especially like the last sort of five or six thousand years of human history have scaled the domination model. And that's about really clear chain of command, really clear hierarchy. But a lot of that has come partly that's like a cultural thing and partly a psychological thing and a trauma thing. But it's also just information theory, you know, like when information was expensive to move around, it kind of made sense to organize everything into these departments and to have a really clear like information goes up, decisions come down that kind of made sense. But we're living through a transition now where networks are actually much more efficient than institutions. Information doesn't cost anything to move around. Everyone kind of access to everything. And so just that basic information theory side of things changes the game entirely. And like, yeah, you can talk to like activists and radicals like me and my friends, but you can also talk to the US Army, right? Like, I really recommend this book, Team of Teams by General Standing McClip McChrystal. And he explains like how big chunks of the US Army now operate on a completely decentralized model with like the smallest amount of hierarchy they can get away with. And it's all about pushing information and autonomy out to the edges. And the job of the people at the top of the hierarchy is kind of like spotting where the gaps are and asking good questions and making sure that things are not falling through. But they're not really calling the shots, it's like people on the edges are calling the shots because they have the best access to information. So like, I think just on that pure almost like computational layer, this kind of concrete, how does the information flow? How do we make good decisions? I think because of the way information technology is changing, we're going through a transformation and what's possible for different modes of organizing. So it's one dimension, but I guess the side that I've become more interested in is this like cultural psychological level, you know? So I'm definitely coming with a bias that I think this domination submission pattern is inferior to the partnership pattern. Like I'd rather be surrounded by peers who respect me. You know, partnership for me means we're different, we're not equal, we're not pretending to all be the same. We've all got different competencies, different strengths, different values, different perspectives. And partnership means that those different characters come together in a spirit of like mutual curiosity, mutual respect, spirit of exchange, and like, what can we learn from each other? Whereas the domination submission model is like, you just rank who's the most important or who's the strongest or who's the richest, and you give the power to the people at the top of the ranking. Yeah, I just prefer, and I think a lot of people would prefer to be surrounded with partnership relationships rather than domination submission ones. And I think it's like the kind of common stories we tell about human history are all focused on this domination side of the spectrum. But I think there's pretty compelling evidence that it's not the only way that things have been done. Like the book that's currently getting a lot of attention is the dawn of everything by David Wengrove and David Graber, where they're saying their argument is basically like pre-agriculture at least, and even post-agriculture a little bit, but definitely pre-agriculture. The norm was experimenting with different social forms, and some of them at very large scale, like whole cities that were organized without any obvious center point of command. So it can scale, but for one thing, it's scaling usually based on replication rather than like, you know, like I was saying about Occupy, like we had simultaneous actions in 3000 cities, because everyone was just replicating a bunch of ideas that they saw on the internet, and it was a permissionless environment for them to do that. So that's operating at scale with a huge amount of both power and dexterity, nimbleness, responsiveness, you know, that would be enviable for any organization, any top-down organization. But there was no one in the top of the hierarchy of the Occupy Aug chart that could call the shots and say, no, you can't do that, or yes, you must do that. There's no one with that coercive authority. And for me, that's a feature, not a bug. But yeah, I guess the other piece of it is like I mentioned the word trauma. Like the way that I see it, domination is the norm, you know, like I described my family. And I come from a loving family. It's great. I love my parents that love me, you know, it's not like I'm showing up with this like terrible story or something. But still, I was trained to obey. And sometimes that kind of parenting was completely focused on my growth and development and safety, and like they were putting boundaries in place because that's what kids need, you know, to be safe and to to grow healthy as they need some boundaries. But also sometimes it was just easier for my dad to say, well, I'm the boss, we do it my way. You don't get a say. And not just my dad, right? Like my teachers, the people in church, like my interactions with the state was like everywhere that I looked was there's someone else out there who calls the shots who tells me what I have to do. And if they are in a position of power, I can't disagree with them or else I'm going to be punished. And I think that leaves a significant amount of trauma on people. I think a lot of people are traumatized by having to go to school and having to ask to use the bathroom, you know, like what an absurd, what an absurd concept that I have to put my hand up and say, Miss, I need a P, can I please, you know, and that's the norm. I'm not talking about drastic events that, you know, it's not like a was zone where you expect people to get PTSD. It's like just normal everyday life, I think is still traumatizing people. And so when people try and step out of that dominated mode where they say, okay, we're not going to do that, we're going to be more like democratic, more inclusive, more partnership oriented. We've still got all of our conditioning, all of our patterns that we learn, like I was basically trained to submit some of the time and then look for the opportunities where it's my turn to dominate. And that's like something that I learned since I was a baby, you know, it's not something that I can just switch off because they say, Oh, I'm in a co-op now, I'm going to stop doing that. It takes a lot more than that. So I think a lot of the attempts that we've seen for people to scale a different way of organizing like occupy, for example, operating in really, it's not like a nutritious context. It's an oppositional context. It's like we're trying to do something wholesome and positive and democratic in an environment that just doesn't support that where all of the biases are pushing out of the way. And not just the biases outside of us, it's not just like the weather out there is bad. It's also what's happening inside of us, our own reflexes and instincts and mindsets and ways of thinking, you know, like there's a lot of people that you give them a bunch of autonomy. And I don't know what to do with that, because they've never had it before. They've never really, no one's ever asked them what do you want to do? It's like, what am I supposed to do? What do I have to do? What's expected of me? So yeah, there's this whole kind of internal psychological, you know, interior stuff that needs to change. And that changes in a culture. So like, if we had a culture of like a partner partnership-oriented culture, then I think it would be, you'd see lots and lots of partnership-oriented organizations thriving and scaling it, you know, at a great pace. But don't grow up in that context. Most of us live in a domination context. So yeah, it's a bit like trying to establish human civilization on Mars, you know, like it's probably possible. But you're really pushing against the grain.

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