Thread by @rafathebuilder

Community scale is based on parallelisation, not sequential speed. Investing in core foundations to support multiple decoupled projects is the key.

Reflecting on this thought: why does it feel like traditional companies are constrained by this? What are the characteristics that help parallel execution vs. coupled dependencies?

It seems like the pyramid is meant to work as a compromise between sequential alignment and decoupled work:

A traditional Org has waterfall communication and ambiguity interpretation. Each manager level is in charge of converting strategy into Ops and action.

But the parallelisation is capped by managerial span of control limits. The intentional human oversight is a cap.

Each layer in the Org could be thought as a proxy for sequential communication. This makes sense - and it’s one of the reasons the Big4 consultancies is obsessed with increasing span and decreasing layers.

In digital communities though, a well articulated North Star and emergent philosophy of experimentation probably 10xed the “span of control”. Automation at the core means the central core can manage thousands of teams (in a near future).

Currently, I’m not sure digital communities have hit escape velocity on the span of control limits. DAOs are mostly shifting to delegate boards and councils instead of successfully moving to an automated core.

That being said, similar to tech firms, digital communities are benefiting from parallelisation in developer ecosystems, and extending this now to content creators. This is probably the start of something bigger.

The biggest unlock though is yet to come for most DAOs. L1s in many ways have escaped though: each DAO is a parallel and decoupled initiative off the primary “holding L1 co’” (eg ETH)

Once DAOs evolve from product, data and content studios to their own L1 automated core, there’ll most definitely be another step change in the ecosystem.

Strange times ahead.