It’s important to call out that emergent strategy isn’t “bottoms up” in the traditional sense. It’s less about “listen to who’s close to the customer” and more about organizational introspection “how do we as a community contribute to our ecosystem”
As a consequence, strategies vary a lot and flexibility becomes a requirement to flourish (not grow) and find a balance with the ecosystem of the digital organization.
With this variability, the process of fixed job definition would be counterproductive: The agents would be restricted from responding effectively to community and ecosystem dynamics.
Instead, what @mel_being correctly intuited, agents aren’t really “taking on roles” as much as flowing through zones of contribution - based on network demands.
If you like physics, this might remind you of balancing pressure between multiple chambers… (like Agent effort allocated between Guilds)
Unlike Jobs which have Levels - this new concept distances itself of hierarchy across groups and internal competition for resources. This mindset adjusts to a collaboration priority: agents are encouraged to move to the internal “chamber” which has the highest need.
This makes sense, especially when many agents are generalists, information is easily available, skill sets are fairly acquirable online, and payment can scale with need.
In a traditional org, almost none of these assumptions hold true:
- many agents are specialists
- information is difficult to obtain
- skill sets require approvals
- payment is set by external and not internal market
By increasing internal accessibility to knowledge and having responsive payments instead of externally anchored rates, digital orgs can increase their responsiveness and better allocate talent to needs.
Many of the DAOs I’ve participated in so far have three main Contribution Zones:
Signalling (passive)
- Token Holders and Members
Production (moderately active)
- Bounty Hunters and Contributors
Stewardship (highly active)
- Staff members
Each guild has members across contribution zones, and surplus resources either flow into passive signalling and/or reallocated to other guilds based on their signalling needs.
Time will tell if this is just nascent design based on current ecosystem ambiguity… or if it’s actually a new emerging form of digital operating models.
- Tipping and shoutouts for good work, democratised across the org
- Integration of customers into shared digital spaces with the company
- Transparency in all components of the org, all metrics across all teams
- Minimal mobility friction between jobs, let ppl follow their muse
- Option for part-time participation across multiple orgs (this is advanced mode)
- Internal payment market for high-need activities (eg bonuses for high-demand work)
- Encouragement / expectation that each employee is building their own personal knowledge management system
Some thoughts on Social DAO token price appreciation:
Need to solve for two problems: 1. Sustainable growth 2. Community freshness
My take is that the current community will need to create sponsor relationships: One member can “host” up to X others with a derivative access token that decays over Y period of time.
Only the holder of the OG membership can mint these decaying passes.
- Hodler Segmentation
- Community Engagement
- Production Alignment
- Governance Participation
- Contributor Profiling
- Partnership & Ecosystem
- Community Dynamism
- Bounty Lead Time and Turnover
Shortcut: volume of discussion on token price vs. production
Metrics:
- % of token holders by reputation
- Messages per hour, reaction mix
- # of in-flight projects, % intermix
- % of membership voting, by proposal type
- Contributor reputation mix, hours per week attention, values cohesion
- Inter-DAO informal agreements, member overlap…
Is not a question that is used, at all, in digital-native communities. Why is that?
Most members assume: You take on what you can, the work will be reviewed anyways, even if they’ve never done something before the internet will help them get there.
Consider how radical this behaviour is. Let it sit for a second. I still can’t believe it.
Of course, many failures will come as a result - but I hope that question doesn’t ever come into the day to day conversation.
Unlike traditional organizations where strategy is defined and then resources gathered to complete strategy …
many (if not most) digital-native organizations seem to gather resources first (community) through value signalling, and then investigate available capabilities, convert to product and lastly into an emergent strategy.
This inversion doesn’t seem to be intuitive (to me at least) and yet, seems like it has potential to have better outcome fit… things are getting weird when we work off information abundance and low communication friction.
It would be likely that the communities founded today will reshape the ecosystem, yet those that expand beyond early adopters are more likely become the dominant behemoths.