Why is Async on Complex Projects Hard?
Questions/Challenges, What are DAOs?
Once again, Hello from the Himalayas!
First, let me share what’s bothering me this week. I’m struggling with avoiding the noise— the addictive news, particularly on Twitter— is a challenge. However, simply disconnecting from the world affairs completely, is hardly a sustainable solution for someone like me, who thrives on capturing a few signals out of the noise. I’m still making attempts at this, with growing set of tactics like temporary uninstalling Twitter for a couple of days. It’s comic-tragically ineffective.
Moving on, I’ve been thinking about the evermore relevant issue of asynchronous teamwork— the opportunity it presents in overhauling teamwork and challenges in finding reliably effective patterns to make it work. From the asynchronous collaboration attempts I’ve witnessed directly or indirectly, I’ve some thoughts which are salient to understanding this process. Here I’m outlining a half-baked list of factors that matter in making/breaking projects involving asynchronous collaboration.
Please keep in mind, the context here is asynchronous collaboration between team members working on a complex project(eg: developing a new product-line, reconfiguring the architecture of internal data-systems, expanding into a new market, writing a new research paper, making a new TV series, et al).
Trust
The cost of the lack-of-trust between fellow team members is high and it grows exponentially along with the complexity of the project.
Trying to fill this gap with bureaucratic processes only produces a false-impression of productivity, reduces measurability of true outcome signals —rendering short-term measurable outputs(KPIs) as the sole focus.
Leaning on each other - asking relevant & feasible favors(starting small) from each other is an underrated trust-building mechanism. A mutual history of making and keeping promises (within the scope of the project or even outside of it) is the foundation of establishing trust.
Measurement of Contribution
The issue of measurement of individual contribution is connected at the hip with many critical factors including incentives and coordination-mechanism. How this is done directly affects decisions regarding the composition of a team for a complex project.
In a 2004 essay about making wealth via a startup, Paul Graham highlighted the difficulty of measurement of individual contribution in large teams. Larger the group is, harder it is to approximate. In the absence of a mutually-agreeable, outcome-linked incentive-structure, all team members get credited with the average contribution. This means, high performers are incentivized to either do-the-average-contribution or exit the team.
To keep the individual contributions measurable (on outcome-linked output), complex projects demand smaller teams.
What gets measured is what self-starter individuals hack to achieve. More closely-linked the metrics are to the desired-outcome of the project, higher the proportion of member output being useful. Can DAOs with equity-linked compensation help with this?
Coordination
Where synchronous collaboration provides a common temporal context, asynchronous teamwork needs an alternative. Recorded meeting videos, documentation of team knowledge-base or permanent chat logs are a weak alternative to fill this gap.
Catching up with past team-activity is one thing, orchestrating complimentary future activity is another beast. Modularity of execution operations is important in handling uncertainty during the evolution of a complex project.
Active sharing of up-to-date team strategy(centralized) and of the status of each member’s progress(decentralized) is non-trivial to do. Also, it is critical to do this where the work of team members is interdependent to avoid multiple people reinventing the wheel. Are there tools and methods for encoding this habit of writing down status-logs for the rest of the team? Is Github a good model to be generalized to non-programming work?
Shared-ownership of the project is the holy-grail to minimize the management required. Apart from coming up with a mutually-agreeable incentive-structure, cultivating a sense-of-belonging can be a game-changer. One way of making this happen is offering clarity on why membership in this small-group is special and differentiated from other-people. This comes close to identifying differentiated values of members, and how they seek intimacy within this group. Personal investments for the group is an effective way to sparking this sense-of-belonging.
Asynchronous collaboration requires a minimum threshold of self-starter momentum. That means, self-selection of the form and amount of individual contribution is, in general, more effective than top-down task allocation.
Relevant Reading:
Research Paper on human cooperation- The Ultra Social Animal.
Research Paper on a contemporary theory of the Sense of Community.
Paul Graham’s 2004 essay on making wealth via a startup.
From DAOs towards…
Another thing on my mind is the emergence of a new generation of DAOs and their potential applications for enabling asynchronous collaboration, particularly for free-agents.
Today, the organizational unconscious looms large against the failure of institutions and infrastructure to support public welfare, and the multigenerational quest for the resilient organization continues. One conception gaining adherents is the DAO: a decentralized autonomous organization.
- Kei Krutler in Eight Qualities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations(2020)
A few examples of interesting experimental DAOs:
MetaCartel DAO (Venture Capital)
RaidGuild DAO— a nascent collective of free-agents providing services for building web3 products.
dOrg DAO— a decentralized collective of web3 free-agents up for-hire. More you earn, more equity in the DAO you get.
Collab19 DAO— collecting and distributing funding for covid19 projects with decentralized governance.
Here’s a quick-intro to the DAO ecosystem for the uninitiated, with links to relevant resources—
Questions:
What mechanisms are worth borrowing from the DAO ecosystem to apply in asynchronous collaboration context of a complex project?
What’s the correlation between the trust-level within a team of free-agents and incentive-alignment needs?
Can BigCorp employees make asynchronous collaboration work for high-leverage projects by curating a networked team of employees?
Side Note: networked team = a team assembled just-in-time for a special need, composed of members across the hierarchy levels and the functional departments. An example of assembling a networked team inside a corporate context is shown in this scene from the movie Margin Call.
Before ending the note, here’s an amusingly relatable parody of the historical period-drama movie 1917. A really well done, one-shot take on living through the pandemic in a metropolis. It was shot during the early months of the pandemic.
That’s it for today. Take it easy, folks.
Until Next Time,
Vinay