There was a hot take on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:
“DAOs need CEOs,” the tweet read.
The comments were full of mixed reviews — some dissented heavily, saying a single CEO is too centralized, while others felt that DAOs need more direction, which a centralized leader could provide.
They’re both right. The desire for direction and unification in DAOs is warranted — the messiness of DAOs today can get very tiring, very quickly.
But, CEOs are the antithesis to decentralization. If a DAO had a CEO, would it still be a DAO?
I think what the tweet could’ve read was:
“DAOs should have a clearly-defined mission that guides everyone.”
Because we need a little more unity in DAOs, don’t we? Everyone who’s worked in DAOs probably knows what it feels like to be unmoored, searching for that north star to guide them forward.
That north star is the mission.
Today, I’ll be exploring how to define mission in a decentralized system. Then, I’ll propose three tactics DAOs can use to build and refine their mission ASAP.
“Consider a school of fish and how they swim in perfect unison, yet without any clear instructions or map for where they are going,” wrote Cabin DAO in an article on decentralized branding. “First, think of the DAO as a school of fish and the expression of the DAO brand as the entire school shifting and changing as it navigates through the sea toward its destination.”
They describe this as a critical “sensing and responding” process that allows the DAO to move together as a unit, but not get stuck in its old, slow ways.
Mission as a school of fish sounds fantastic. But like a flock of birds flying south or the school of fish swimming in unison, how do we learn to move in unison without employing hierarchical structures?
Let’s see how the animals do it.
The jury’s still out on the birds — geese have a clear leader guiding the pack, but other flocks of birds are still being studied.
The fish, however, are easier to study and yield interesting findings. The Audubon Magazine quoted research from biologist Dmitrii Radakov. This is how fish swim:
“Even if only a handful of individuals know where a predator is coming from. . . they can guide a huge school by initiating a turn that their neighbors emulate — and their neighbors’ neighbors, and so on.”
So, only one individual needs to sense the threat to move the whole school to safety.
Audubon continues: “Unlike linear flocks of geese, which do have a clear leader, clusters are democratic. They function from the grassroots; any member can initiate a movement that others will follow.”
When applied to DAOs, this means the process of defining mission in a “school of fish” method could be incredibly democratic and grassroots….or, given that us humans aren’t evolved to sense and respond in packs or taught to work effectively in groups that lack a hierarchy, divergent and hard to follow.
When everyone can define mission, how do you stay on track with one single, coherent mission?
Other great thinkers in the space have similar ideas about a “grassroots” mission emerging, but little on how to keep that mission coherent and cohesive. Everyone continued to lean on our natural world for guidance.
Ted Rau, author of Who Decides Who Decides? wrote, “In a decentralized, non-coercive system, there are also not power-over relationships between the layers. A forest can’t demand from a tree to grow faster. A tree can’t tell a forest to provide more resources. It’s just not how things work.”
I love this forest analogy, but I continue to wonder what that looks like in day-to-day working functions.
The Reinventing Organizations Wiki, the website where management practices for teal organizations are housed, views strategy as a living organism similar to Cabin DAO’s school of fish analogy and Rau’s forest analogy.
According to the site, strategy in Teal organizations “happens organically, all the time, everywhere, as people toy with ideas and test them out in the field. The organization evolves, morphs, expands, or contracts, in response to a process of collective intelligence.”
This strategy, however, is all guided by “purpose,” which is a level above strategy. Purpose is what the organization is called to do. It’s the reason the organization exists. In Teal organizations, purpose changes, which is why it’s called Evolutionary Purpose. It’s meant to change.
I love the idea of DAOs borrowing tactics from sociocracy and Teal Organizations. But I also question if a DAO should have a changing purpose. Changing strategy — the means to achieve that mission or purpose — makes sense. But I get stuck when I imagine a DAO drastically changing its purpose, or what it originally set out to do.
Maybe Sociocracy is a better way to look at mission in DAOs than Teal Organizations. Rau wrote that the mission should not change much over time, but ways to achieve that mission, such as aims and strategy, should change.
Let’s explore this concept further, using Cabin’s mission as an example.
Their 1-year mission is to “become the embassy for DAOs” and their 10-year mission is to “become the decentralized city for creators.”
The strategy they use to achieve those two missions might change — they might create IRL DAO contributor retreats, host a DAO-focused conference, have AMAs Twitter spaces, write articles about DAOs, or anything else that they find furthers their mission.
The strategy can change — maybe they decide they don’t want to host a DAO conference but would rather plan events happening around a general blockchain/DeFi-oriented conference — but their main mission would remain in place.
Another example is Maker DAO. Their mission is to create “the world’s first unbiased currency,” but their strategy to accomplish that has changed multiple times. They’ve been a DAO, then a foundation, and then a DAO again. They’ve made these choices to adjust to the ever-changing DeFi landscape. This is because in our 21st century VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous — it’s not practical to have set-in-stone strategies anymore.
But I’d argue that the mission should be clear. It should be narrow and well-defined, not broad and vague.
But, who set that mission originally? It was likely a small group or maybe just a single person. They set the mission and then let the community take it from there.
The mission guided the community, but the mission was already set by someone else. And then we are back at the beginning — how to create mission in a decentralized way.
I’ll propose a few options for using a decentralized ethos to set and define a coherent mission:
A mission set by the founding group and revisited by the community yearly.
A mission aggregated by community leaders into a cohesive document after the organization has taken life (see The Blue Pill Book).
A mission that starts with constraints, and works backgrounds (see the MolochDAO manifesto).
DAOs may start small, and when they do, they should define their mission right away. That definition will inform the DAO where to go next — everything from onboarding new members to shipping their first product or service will be guided by the mission.
But, given our VUCA world, staying attached to one laser-focused, precise mission can be damaging. Let’s take a side trip into centralized organizations. Apple has always had varying missions around user experience. The overall mission, while it has changed in semantics, has not changed much in terms of the main goal to make powerful technology easy to use. Apple has altered its mission and strategy slightly when responding to our VUCA world.
DAOs can take a page from Apple’s book and set a broad mission that encompasses many paths, but continuing to refine that mission as the world changes.
Revisiting that mission could look like a yearly vote. Or, an all-hands, town-hall-style meeting where the contributors talk about if the mission should or shouldn’t change. It could even be an IRL retreat where DAO contributors talk about what the mission means to them.
The DAO can revisit the mission in the way that best works for them, but the most important thing is that they continue to have conversations around the mission.
One of my favorite examples of mission-setting in DAOs is Yearn’s foundational book, The Blue Pill.
The Blue Pill is “a spiritual guide for the past, present, and future.” This book is an illustrated telling of the history of Yearn, how it evolved, and where it could go.
It reads, “These pages are dangerous. Naming our vision could limit us, and we are limitless….We’re putting our vision on paper, so that when forks arise in the road, there is a place contributors can go. To get an answer to the question: Is this Yearn?”
I like that they formed the protocol (the famous Yearn yield aggregator) and the beginning of the community (Yearn DAO) before they wrote this book. Then, once they had the start of a mission, they wrote it. This is an example of emergent mission — the book is just the record.
To be clear, the protocol and mission for the protocol itself was developed by a single founder. And a large piece of the DAO’s mission is to maintain that protocol. So, there are a few asterisks that come with this “emergent” mission. But the main takeaway is that the mission can be refined later on by the community and doesn’t need to be set-in-stone from day one.
MolochDAO has a simple, brief manifesto in the form of an “is” and “is not” list. “Moloch does not cater to speculators” and “Moloch is public goods,” are two examples on their list.
I like this “is” and “is not” list a lot. The list defines boundaries in which a mission can emerge. The constraints are useful in narrowing contributors’ focus and giving boundaries to the wilderness contributors can explore while seeking their true mission.
MolochDAO also clearly defines its threats, which can be used to inform mission and strategy and further refine their boundaries. They don’t want a world that gets turned into what they call “a paper clip machine,” which is a world in which an artificial superintelligence gains enough intelligence that it can essentially destroy humanity to achieve the goal it was originally programed for — which, in this case, is to make paperclips. They write, “Smart contracts > automated global financial system > an artificial general intelligence that turns the world into a paper clip machine = a very real existential risk that should be taken seriously.” (More on that paper clip machine here, and more on why that paper clip machine might come sooner than we think here and here.)
They define their “is” and “is not”s, then put a couple threats into the picture (in their case the threats are existential threats to humanity, which might be a tad lofty for most DAOs), and the mission emerges from there.
I see this “constraint first” approach as a good way for setting some boundaries on the mission. Start wide, then scale down. Boundaries can help contributors narrow in on their mission even further than they would have previously.
Failure to set a mission is holding DAOs back. Many DAOs form simply for the “vibes” but don’t ever define a cohesive enough mission to stick together. DAOs can employ those three strategies for setting mission in a decentralized way, and then break down the elements of strategy into separate teams that work to achieve the mission in separate ways.
The old adage, “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together” applies to mission in DAOs. Only with a shared mission can DAOs go together to create a better world. This article is both a call to action and a toolkit for DAO communities to do the hard work of defining mission in a decentralized way.