Project update: Building culture in decentralized organizations, intentionally and systematically: Drafts for review

tl;dr: You can comment and contribute to four upcoming posts reporting my recent research on culture building in decentralized orgs. Or you can wait until they are out.

“Culture” is mysterious and goopy, but valuable and important in decentralized organizations. In the past 9 months, I have taxonomized across the systems of people who build culture for a living, with an eye to the need for intentional culture building in decentralized organizations. I have posted the first two parts of this project already, and recently completed the second stage of research, which I will share in four upcoming posts.

In the interest of supporting real engagement and dialogue, I thought I’d post some drafts now on the alpha/beta crowdwriting platform crowdwrite.xyz. And if you’d rather read and comment on them when they are done, just sit tight.

  • Post #1, already posted, laid out the question and the tensions motivating it: Can decentralized organizations do what decentralized organizations do: focus design effort and energy on mechanism, incentives, and the “tangibles” of organization design, or do they have to put energy into intangibles as well?
  • Post #2, already posted, shared the results from 5 pre-interviews with culture building professionals: practicing consultants who have worked in enough organizations to develop a general view of what culture is and how an organization can change it. Despite major differences in their backgrounds, they all do basically the same thing. This suggests that culture building, as a set of concrete shared practices, is not a mystic art, but something any community can do with enough energy and commitment.
  • Post #3, DRAFT FOR COMMENT HERE describes the second “literature review” part of the study: what we did (read a bunch of books by more consultants) and some of the meta takeaways of the effort.
  • Post #4, DRAFT FOR COMMENT HERE, describing the five qualities or dimensions of culture that authors across our review had the most agreement on. These are concrete qualities things that our efforts at culture building can target with specific, concrete interventions.

Thank you for supporting this work with your interest and engagement.

Seth Frey (Home , Twitter )

2 Likes

@enfascination I like your effort, but here’s what I think;
In a decentralized firm, there is no single decision maker, team leader, or supervisor, thus creating a culture consciously and systematically can be challenging. Some individuals hold the opinion that culture is highly subjective and that it will fluctuate depending on the employees of the organization, although this isn’t always the case. The people in charge of your company’s culture need to regularly discuss it and reinforce it. Find ways to involve employees who aren’t at the top in decisions and initiatives because they frequently have insider knowledge of the factors that contribute to the culture of your workplace that outsiders cannot.

Thanks Humphery,

Find ways to involve employees who aren’t at the top in decisions and initiatives because they frequently have insider knowledge of the factors that contribute to the culture of your workplace that outsiders cannot.

Yes, for the people I talked to this is 100% of the work of culture building. There is a picture that centralized orgs have people in charge of culture that they impose top down, but practitioners who come in — at least all the ones I talked to — see it as inherently bottom up. That’s why I think it’s compatible with decentralized organizations.

In a decentralized firm, there is no single decision maker, team leader, or supervisor, thus creating a culture consciously and systematically can be challenging.

As I understand it, many DAOs have a “community manager” role. Those are already doing what I say here. My thesis is that that role is very valuable if you don’t want the hardest (non-system/process/mechanism) half of your org to be a die roll.

2 Likes