There's a growing hole in the middle of our organisations. Decentralisation is spreading and it comes in many forms. It could simply be about moving some of the power and decision-making away from the core and into the hands of those closer to the daily work – that's covered more in Hierarchy-Lite. Here, we will look at more radical forms of decentralisation, where new models go beyond just restructuring organisations – they lead us to rethink what an organisation is.
Radical decentralisation can lead to a group of people collaborating through very loose connections, with members at the edges drifting in and out of the community while those in the core do most of the work. We can call this an "organisation" or even a "company" because it does work and produces value, but we may not be able to define where it ends, how it operates and who is in it.
Participation in such communities requires some flexibility and patience. Members must be able to work within great uncertainty, to try things that might fail, to accept widely diverse mindsets and approaches from their fellows, and then to get behind unexpected successes when they emerge.
<aside> ⭐ Enspiral
A nebulous community of people following the shared idea of “more people working on stuff that matters”. Some members engage heavily, while others are rarely seen. Some are there mainly to work on paid projects, while others just want a supportive community around them. Through this mix of behaviours and perspectives, members experiment with various “social technologies” to see what will catalyse the best outcomes.
Read: → 📒 The Enspiral Handbook – An actively managed guide to the community's rules and learnings. → Better Work Together – Lessons and insights from the Enspiral community’s greatest successes and failures. It is a collaborative effort, authored by several Enspiral members.
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<aside> ⭐ Yak Collective
A network of freelancers who communicate through Discord to collaborate on projects and published writings. Although the Yak Collective "has been growing in the background since early 2019", it formally launched only in March 2020 yet already claims over 300 members. Those members are independent freelancers who continue to operate as such – the collective doesn't make any claims over its members – but also have the opportunity to collaborate in teams on larger projects.
Our philosophy of work and life is radically tech-positive because it has to be. The indie life is only possible because an ever-growing and maturing stack of new digital technologies makes it possible, and increasingly accessible.
Read: Yak Collective Reports – especially Don't Waste the Reboot, a collective publication from early in the Covid pandemic, taglined "making the next normal better than the last one".
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<aside> ⭐ Codesign-it
Effectively an agency providing innovation services for clients, Codesign-it operates an open collective model, whereby members can form together around projects as needed.
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<aside> ⭐ Valve
Founded in 1996, Valve is the producer of several multi-award-winning computer games, including its 1998 debut, Half Life, which PC Gamer rated as the Best PC Game Ever. They also created Steam "in 2003 to serve as a digital content distribution channel, before app stores existed" and they build other advanced software and hardware related to their sector, such as VR engines and gaming controllers. Now the company has over 300 staff, headquartered in Washington State, USA.
Valve's famous Handbook for New Employees is presented with this tagline:
A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do.
The Handbook was published in 2012 but still reads as a guide to a refreshingly innovative company. A key tenet of working at Valve is that you have no boss, you are part of a self-managing and self-organising community, and concurrent with this is that you also have no job. It is up to you to go and talk to other teams (cabals, as Valve calls them) find out what they're doing, and see if you can help.
Why does your desk have wheels? Think of those wheels as a symbolic reminder that you should always be considering where you could move yourself to be more valuable.
On teaming, the handbook says:
Cabals are really just multidisciplinary project teams. We’ve self-organized into these largely temporary groups since the early days of Valve. They exist to get a product or large feature shipped. Like any other group or effort at the company, they form organically. People decide to join the group based on their own belief that the group’s work is important enough for them to work on.
And on their type of staff:
We value “T-shaped” people. That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things—the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow discipline—the vertical leg of the T).
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<aside> ⭐ Smart
Launched in Belgium in 1998, Smart is a European cooperative with over 35,000 members, across 40 cities in nine European countries (the reported numbers vary). They "aim to simplify and support the professional paths of creative and cultural workers".
Smart enables workers, entrepreneurs and organisations to invoice, to work together with other professionals and to manage a budget on an occasional or a long-term basis.
Smart places the worker, bearer of economic and social value, at the centre of its mission so that he/she can acquire social rights and develop his or her professional activities to the fullest.
Smart offers various services to members, including "information, training, legal advice, a social professional network, co-working spaces, etc. Also at the heart of Smart, you will have access to online invoicing tools".
Members of Smart arrange all the aspects of their work with their client but, on producing the work contract to Smart, Smart takes payment and you become a salaried worker for Smart. It then pays your social security, and guarantees payment to you 7 days after completion of work, even if the client hasn't paid yet.
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<aside> ⭐ We Are Open Co-op
A community that helps build communities. Members "work to spread the culture, processes and benefits of [...] open learning, open innovation and open communities". They operate a collective, paid-membership model with well-defined social expectations.
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<aside> ⭐ Wemind
A France-based member community for freelancers that provides the benefits of a larger employer to the self-employed, including: health insurance, income maintenance, civil liability cover and union-style discounts.****
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A good article on the concept of the amorphous organisation (and where we heard the term!) is #31: Alternative sociality // Uncertain times and amorphous organizations, by Vaughn Tan.
A delegate at a recent conference proposed that "blockchain" should be called the "B Word" because they were sick of hearing people suggest it as a solution for anything. Poverty? Disease? Biodiversity? Inequality? Blockchain that mofo!
One way to mitigate the spread of blockchain-itis is to start by asking, "would the blockchain offer anything unique that couldn't be built with traditional resources?" If yes then...
The promise of the blockchain with respect to the future of work largely boils down to decentralising money, decisions, communication and agreements. Rather than being dependent on those in higher echelons to own and manage the systems and processes by which we conduct our work, those assets are placed on-chain where they are owned by nobody, and activated either by the individuals doing the work or wholly automatically.
Take the example of smart contracts. Here, some cryptocurrencies (blockchains) allow agreements and exchanges to be defined in machine code so they can be executed automatically, without any of the involved parties having to trust another to fulfil their part of the deal. This is part of a wider paradigm of trustless systems, in which work can be transacted without needing first to develop a trusting relationship between parties. On the blockchain, valuable assets such as money are not owned or controlled by a single entity, but rather distributed across many, hence the reduction in the need for trust.
<aside> 👌 Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO)
A DAO replaces part of an ordinary organisation's functions (and typically some of the cost) with a computer-based system that removes the need for those functions. Built on the blockchain, DAOs are finding an expanding range of use but typically function as exchanges for contracts, money and such forms of trust-based assets, removing the need to employ trust-based services such as lawyers and banks. We might see major new organisations forming entirely on-chain in the coming years but at time of writing this new form business is still in its teething stage.
For more about building and hosting a DAO, check out these platforms: Aragon and Colony.
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