What To Change To

We need radical innovation to solve all constraints to human coordination with a new form of organizational development that solves for all areas of human wellbeing.

Purpose — All The Way Down

Before web3, before digital automation, before tokenization — even before personal computers — cutting edge management practice began to emerge in the 1970s.

Bill Oncken nailed the essence of effective and efficient people management thus:

“All projects and tasks shall be owned and handled at the lowest organization level consistent with their welfare.”

Yes! That directly speaks to our web3 value of autonomy and ownership of roles.

And the in-built caveat is project welfare. That is, quality of results. That is, performance, effectiveness, success criteria.

Oncken further identified that management should be “hands-off as much as possible and hands-on as much as necessary”.

...As necessary to ensure the desired outcome.

And while it is necessary to define overall organizational purpose. It is NOT sufficient to stop there.

Purpose must exist explicitly with painstaking comprehensive clarity and transparency at EVERY ‘level’ of an organization.

Because a hierarchy of requirements is inherent in achieving a purpose, replace soul-based hierarchies (people) with role-based hierarchies (functions).

Only when deliverables and subsequent dependencies are made clear can teams be most effective. This should be obvious, and yet we flounder in a haze of loosey-goosey free-reigning individual autonomy, having not mastered the distinction of ‘role’ vs ‘soul’.

Roles Before Souls

Also in the 1970’s, from a very different angle of maximizing inclusivity and respectful autonomy without hierarchical dictatorship, Sociocracy evolved the notions of consent-based collaboration.

It popularized the idea that “the role is not the soul” which is superficially interpreted as 'duties of a role should not be pinned to the value of the person who contributes to the role'.

This becomes an insidious get out clause, where best efforts are applauded regardless of performance.

Oh contraire, we need to turn this entirely on its head!

The role should not be tied to an individual at the point of defining the role.

Roles are requirements for innovation and operation.

Roles MUST be achieved one way or another, by one or more people, whoever or however proves capable.

Define roles independent of people who contribute to fulfilling them. The role is not the soul.

Roles are inherent to the purpose of the organization, at all levels of welfare.

Make role descriptions granular with clear specificity. Use SOP's (standard operating procedures) or process check-lists.

Each role includes it’s function (why it exists, what it exists to provide or achieve) and its SOP.

Where those SOP’s are ill-defined, they will become better defined through a cycle of experimentation, learning and innovation.

Only once alignment exists within the group on roles should assignments be considered.

Note: Without clearly defining roles BEFORE assigning roles to souls, roles are greatly influenced by the souls who inhabit them.

Souls then identify as ‘owners’ of roles, leading teams towards the conflicts of borders and boundaries rather than collaborative participation.

Said another way: Roles are not to be shaped subjectively on the basis of available contributors, but rather on the objective basis of fulfilling organizational purpose.

Piecemeal Decision-Making

Bill Oncken also identified a management technique to maximise available quality of performance, described as an insurance policy with 2 options:

"Recommend, and then act. If there is a high risk then the team member should be told to recommend, then get approval (or ‘consent’) from the manager (or ‘circle’) and then act."

"Act, and then advise. If there is little risk, then the team member can act and then advise the manager (or circle) of the results. As team members get more proficient in their tasks this will happen more, but the responsibility has to be delegated (or consented) from the manager (or circle) to ensure safety."

How pithy. How fitting for balancing the risk of enabling distributed decision making through contributor autonomy, while also ensuring alignment and maximum quality assurance among the wider group.