"All the work we do, all of our celebrations, contributions, and sacrifices - at the end of the year every one of us is just another row of expenses on an executive's spreadsheet during comp season."

I had spent the prior two years building a new analytics team focused on operations research, workflow management, and process design for a global Fortune 500 company. My boss - a savvy, fast-rising young leader - recognized my ambition and pulled me into his office for a sober dose of reality. That day I got a lesson in organization dynamics and career management that I'll never forget: success relies on forming relationships to bring your name off the screen and into the culture and success of the org. [1]

Yet I left that role, and most recently the next one, for a trajectory to web3, with all of its adjacent possibilities. I believe a new system, where autonomy, shared value, individuality, and techno-futurism-for-good is possible.

Lessons of leadership from my career (sometimes learned the hard way) are carried with me as I enter the new verse. Some of them are useful for organizing and running DAOs. Enjoy my stream of consciousness.

Leadership reflections

The autonomy expected of a contributor must meet them where they are, perhaps slightly higher. Autonomy requires systems that one can be autonomous within.

Context onboarding is so expensive within an organization. Translating ideas, nuanced decisions, and the story of how a project or team came to be is energy intensive. Written documentation is worth 10x one meeting when process is the topic. [2]

Team diversity adds so much character to the solutions, dynamics, and culture of the org. A genuine appreciation for people and their stories is the only way to do this right. Bottom line improvements is a byproduct. [3]

Individual contributor to successful manager is more of an introspective journey with one's emotional intelligence and ego than an outward facing one about the team you manage.

My proudest corporate achievements have always been promoting a member of my team. Individual contributor to manager is the most exciting. Manager to Director requires a very different skillset and is rewarding in a different way. I expect web3 to feel same, same, but different in this regard for me.

It is not easy to get promoted in a large company. Someone must care about your advancement; it is energy and effort to document an employee's success, and then advocate to increase budget for their contributions at year end. Political capital and soft influence required, both are hard to cultivate in traditional orgs.

Find a way to add value to the most important projects to your team and organization. Stakeholder and customer support directs resources, and resources turn into an energy transfer into business value through smart capital allocation. Progression in the web3 paradigm is a function value allocation. This requires a different mindset.

Why change?

Powerful, enriching, fortune making organizations have existed since humans began cooperating to leverage relative access to resources and creative invention. Why do I need this change? Couldn’t I succeed and be rewarded financially in a well-tested, proven system of corporate advancement?

The answer is: I could succeed, but in web3 I see potential to create a different system and exchange of value for my ideas and output; at the same time build a new network of creatives, builders, and thinkers about the future. This is so much more exciting and rewarding to me.

Technology creates new flows of information presented to us in different ways, changing our adjacent possible in business and communication. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have power to influence human behavior at the very biological core. Proceed with caution.

Open technology may be our only savior from machine learning malice. What will be our relationship with privacy and security as new tools take command? We have the opportunity to shape that answer.

What next

I’ve co-founded Diamond DAO, with a focus on products and research to understand the health of Web3 communities. We have an amazing team, with @amphiboly and @JovianNetwork as co-founders. I’m working on technical project management for our core product, analytics & research strategy, and admin/operations for the DAO - a bit of everything and it’s all fun.

Being on the core team I am in the position to influence change and create an amazing web3 community. I want to meet you and help you explore your web3 interests, wherever you are in your journey. View our community docs to get a sense of who we are at Diamond DAO. We have contributors, a product roadmap, bounty board, and activation process. If you'd like to learn about our product, research, or data, come find me at @c_lemp or @dmndDAO.

Footnotes

[1]: My boss had mastered this art - he was a "'one name" persona throughout the company, and he became a dependency on every important project.

[2]: I believe Elements of Style is one of the most powerful tools for operating in a DAO.

[3] The Difference by Scott E. Page is one of my favorite books on diversity and model thinking. The book changed the trajectory of my life, in a way.

Web3 is a living colony mind of creativity, excitement, and support for one another to build, create, and act on inspirations to harness the adjacent possible.

The Spirit of the DAO is alive, and it is changing me.

What is happening

In the physical world hospitality, community, and bringing people together is core to my self identity. I host, I feed, I connect, share, and embrace those around me. In the technological world I focus internally, inquire, and follow my curiosity but haven’t shared my work too publicly. With its ethos of sharing, the web3 community joins my internal and external worlds.

For weeks I was in the weekly $WRITE race to join Mirror. The simple prompt "what will your use Mirror for?" lingered every Wednesday, forcing me to think about what would be my contribution to the community being built here. What was my place?

Week after week I dug deeper, begged for votes, and clarified my intent: create a supportive community using complex systems research, art, and philosophy to build better web3 organizations.

What better platform to explore the concepts of systems, networks, scale, and cybernetic organizations than a distributed platform with tools and community embedded within?

My art auction

I've been creating generative art with Processing to explore complex systems ideas for years while hording my beauties in a trove on my hard drive. The web3 community has inspired me to share my ideas with others to see where the creativity leads.

With this post I am auctioning my first minted NFTs - a small series of generative automata artworks. Each is born from a deterministic path within multiple quadrillion possibilities of randomness, seeded and unraveled to create complex beauty from simple beginnings.

Each of these NFTs is not only a statement of non-fungible ownership, but also appreciation for the unique conditions that reveal order from chaos, and support for my mission to build a community where DAOs and complex systems intersect.

Automata 0001 - Continue the Search

We are searching for a goal hidden within the complexity of our subconscious. The simple choices we make unravel and illuminate an underlying order guiding our spirit toward the evolving end state; and with this process the cycle of search and renewal lives on.

auction://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7?tokenId=4712

Automata 0002 - Find the Line

Within us lies a divide between comfort and creative disorder. That line is patiently waiting for us, summoning the spirit to peer across into the unknown and follow our curiosity through. Once beyond, the energy of our creative self is set free.

auction://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7?tokenId=4713

Automata 0003 - Where Within?

A wave of creativity pulses against the walls of order in our daily lives. Sometimes the wave is subtle, hidden between the rigid structures providing predictable sequences of steps, one to the next. Our intuition finds that wave and allows it to carry the spirit away.

auction://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7?tokenId=4714

Automata 0004 - Secret Patterns

Within each of us exists a pattern of order and creativity. Humans have developed patterns of expression since we emerged beyond a state of simple existence into the awareness of self. Simple rules, repeated and followed, bring complex beauty to our lives.

auction://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7?tokenId=4715

With your support

The pay it forward, pay it back mindset leads me to release these NFTs as a split auction:

• 10% of funds will go directly to support Cabin DAO

• 10% of funds will go directly to Jon Gold (who gave me the $WRITE token to start this publication)

• 10% post-sale will be donated to the Processing Foundation.

Web3 is about community and I want to contribute to those who helped me realize my own potential. The rest of funds I will use to help fund my PhD, and dive deeper as a contributor to web3 projects.

Over time I want to explore this model for funding research, art, and community around complex systems to build governance tools and models for sustainable DAOs.

Thank you, and please join me in The Spirit of the DAO.

split://0x9047996A65A130B8D333fFDBD3bb4052262800b9?network=mainnet

With DAOs, the principles of self-organization, creativity, and complexity in natural and biological systems can be used to dramatically change how we work.

I log onto my computer and open Discord to see what my DAO cohort has been working on overnight. This organization never stops; it runs 24 hours a day across the globe, building applications, protocols, and data pipelines on top of a distributed blockchain network to move tokens and crypto through a network representing an ecosystem of ideas, desires, and innovation.

I’ve never met these coworkers in real life, nor do I know their names. All I know about them is their avatar, past votes and proposals, and their immutable transaction history on the blockchain. Some of their iconic representations of self cost more in ETH than the down payment to my home. And yet I trust them to contribute to our mission, respect their knowledge, and learn from their perspectives.

How did we get here, and where are we going?

The Traditional Organization

For the past seven years of my career I’ve been writing algorithms and data feeds to automate, coordinate, and eliminate human decisions within Fortune 500 companies. My data science niche is operations research and workflow; I see the organization an information network - tasks, timestamps, and decisions being consumed, processed, and sent along into a system of feedback and throughput.

Ultimately I view Operations as an entropy reduction function within the company - by reducing variety of mundane situations a person has to respond to I can increase the throughput of high value creative thought in an organization. However, incentives, org structures, and technology often make this idealist mindset a difficult reality to achieve. For example:

• Optimizing for the individual, or team not always best for the department

• Matrix management requires energy into communication, navigation, and defining ownership of one’s work

• Transaction data is often aggregated rather than tied to an individual

As the pace of markets increase, communication feedback loops form with new tools to connect us, and we work in distributed geographies, it is time to define new systems of work and coordination. For this task I tap the world of cybernetics.

The Cybernetic Organization

In the 1940’s English psychiatrist W. Ross Ashby began writing about adaptation, self-organization, variety, and control of systems for amplifying intelligence and intuition of the human mind. He brought together the fields of information theory, communications, game theory, and control systems into a formal structure for mapping operations of mind and machine in his book An Introduction to Cybernetics1.

The developments of adjacent technologies and forces of society have brought us to a dawn of using these frameworks to create governance and incentive systems in DAOs. In doing so, we must leave behind the centralized command and control systems in favor of self-organized economic organisms. Here I lay out the main cybernetic principles to guide creation of a successful decentralized autonomous organization.

Mechanism

To move from the handshakes, verbal agreements, and tacit understandings in the traditional organization to the cybernetic view, you must have a computational mindset and recognize your DAO as a system that:

• Accepts inputs (proposals) from an environment

• Responds to those inputs (votes)

• Updates its state (completion of work)

This process is recorded through a series of smart contracts and blocks on the blockchain. Your DAO is a dynamical information system, not unlike a biological organism observing its environment, deciding next best action, and then interacting with its environment as a complex process of adaptation and evolution. Think deeply about how to assign discrete, measureable structure to the intuition, values, and outcomes we use to navigate organizations today.

@rafathebuilder had an interesting tweet about this concept:

Designing incentive structures in digital native organizations feels like building braitenberg vehicles pic.twitter.com/gvt4IOOViH

— rafa0 (@rafathebuilder) August 15, 2021

How do you measure love, fun, excitement, fear, and cohesion when your language is data and information?

Variety

Now that you’ve done the work to map the values and range of outcomes from the decisions made by your DAO, consider this: how do you summarize the state of your DAO given the distribution over the range of values? If fear is high and cohesion is low, how do you characterize the state of your community? How about if love is high, along with cohesion, excitement, and fun?

What range of possible outcomes do you want possible for your DAO? Define specifically how you will measure the various states to describe your DAO’s operations.

Regulation and Control

The most important shift in mindset is that unlike traditional organizations optimizing for an objective like profit, engagement, clicks, these outcomes become emergent properties of the DAO’s governance, culture, and collective dynamics. With the structure you’ve defined for states and outcomes of DAO operations, now decisions about DAO governance can be explored.

For example, if both excitement and fear are running high, perhaps a governance rule to implement is to slow the pace of proposals until frenetic engagement decreases. Conversely, if love, fun, and cohesion are high, perhaps reduce the friction of passing proposals so that the team benefits from this euphoric state. Then use these controls to correlate with the outcomes you seek to optimize for.

In a decentralized organization, the way to ensure resilience is to build control systems that incentive the behaviors you want and regulate those you don’t.

Conclusion

By having mechanisms for shared incentives, distributed decision making, and autonomous regulation of outcomes, the DAO becomes a cybernetic organization exhibiting self-organization, emergence, and resilience over time.

Dawn is early for the decentralized organization: control systems are not yet well defined, DAO metadata is difficult to capture and correlate to governance, and many governance systems have yet to be explored. However, the thread of adjacent possibilites has woven an ecosystem of technology, interest, and energy in rethinking how we engage and define the next chapter of economic organizations.

Engage in this conversation and go deeper on this Twitter thread

With DAOs, the principles of self-organization, creativity, and complexity in natural and biological systems can be used to dramatically change how we work.

Here I lay out the main cybernetic principles to guide creation of a successful DAO.https://t.co/dBoMjIFN7P

— christian | lemp.eth (@c_lemp) August 17, 2021

Footnotes

[1] Many other researchers contributed to the development of intelligent control systems: Norbert Wiener, Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Jon von Neumann, to name a few.

He summarized thousands of years of complex dynamics with a single, simple equation - The Theory of Adjacent Possible, stating that dynamical systems making incremental changes over time explode into an exponential realm of possibilities, and within, a profound order that governs evolution.

A spark of curiosity ignited within me on that cold January day and so did a burning question: how can I apply the principles of complex systems to understand dynamics of collective decisions, self-organization, and the adjacent possible within teams, organizations, and society in today’s world?

That lecturer was Stuart Kauffman, theoretical biologist and expert in self-organization of complex systems, and I was at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) for the 2019 Winter School at MIT to learn about complex systems science, research, and computer modeling. I was so moved by the ideas he put forth that I reached out to Stu to learn more and try to understand my place within this mesh of interests, ideas, and intuition I was developing. He encouraged me to pursue the PhD I was interested in, and invited me for coffee at his home in Santa Fe to talk and share ideas. His succinct advice for me, the intellectual wanderer: "take your curiosity seriously."

Where I go forth

This was the genesis of my own personal adjacent possible. A path of curiosity unwinding forward, without knowing the direction, but being guided by wonder and awe for how we work together, and what we can accomplish when we are free and without bounds.

That path has led me to the Cambrian explosion of Web3, with an adjacent possible of DAOs, new communities, and tools to express ourselves churning open as we build. The systems are being created, and I am developing the methods to understand and shape them. Mirror will be my space to create, share, and make connections within this sea of evolution.

I’ll be writing about DAOs, PhD research, governance and control of complex systems, emergence, and self-organization. I’ll also tap into the eros with my trove of Processing art I’ve silently been generating and storing on my hard drive for years (like the banner of this post). The funds I generate through this Mirror publication will go toward building a community of complex systems research, art, and curiosity.

So thank you Mirror, and the community that got me here. I can’t wait to go forth with you. Special shoutouts to Creator Cabins, @JonathanHillis, @SpaceXponential, @rafathebuilder, @jongold for inspiring me, and helping me find my way. Find me on Twitter @c_lemp to share ideas and start a conversation.