Will the web3 revolutionise management jobs?

The emergence of web3 is leading to the development of new organisational models. Will management jobs be reinvented as a result?

Adrien Book. Fas­cin­at­ing and inter­est­ing devel­op­ments are tak­ing place in this field. But let’s be clear from the out­set that what is hap­pen­ing is not the dis­ap­pear­ance of the world we know, but the emer­gence of a wider range of com­pan­ies, with a wider range of work­ing meth­ods. And these meth­ods dis­rupt a few habits and set patterns.

Web1 brought us new ways of con­sum­ing con­tent, on web­sites. With web2 we were able to par­ti­cip­ate, inter­act, share con­tent on digit­al plat­forms: we were “at home”. What is new with web3 is that we have own­er­ship of what we read and write. Web3 gives us organ­isa­tion­al power: we can cre­ate an eco­sys­tem around a sub­ject, and organ­ise people around that subject.

The cent­ral concept here is DAOs: decent­ral­ised autonom­ous organ­isa­tions, made tech­nic­ally pos­sible by blockchain.

DAOs are a group of people who come togeth­er to make decisions in the digit­al world. They do this with the help of two key tools. First, the rules that gov­ern the organ­isa­tion are expressed as a series of digit­al “if/then” state­ments that are encoded dir­ectly into a block­chain, mak­ing them both audit­able and per­man­ent. Then, vot­ing shares are issued and alloc­ated to stake­hold­ers in the form of “digit­al gov­ernance tokens”, also registered on a blockchain.

DAOs are basic­ally self-organ­ising digit­al com­munit­ies. People vol­un­tar­ily come togeth­er around a set of shared val­ues and work togeth­er to advance their agenda, with the help of smart con­tracts. It’s an emer­gent logic: you start with a mis­sion, and the organ­isa­tion will slowly emerge around it.

So, you don’t choose your employees?

These new digit­al organ­isa­tions do not have a recruit­ment pro­cess. And, rather than employ­ees, you have contributors.

In prac­tice, DAOs today are made up of two types of people: primary con­trib­ut­ors and sec­ond­ary con­trib­ut­ors. As most DAOs work without per­mis­sion, any­one can work on them because their code, smart con­tracts and lists of con­trib­ut­ors are trans­par­ently access­ible to every­one. You can join the Dis­cord serv­er of any DAO and start writ­ing code.

You come in and start work­ing on what you can do and what needs to be done. One of the most inter­est­ing aspects of this sys­tem is that once someone reg­u­larly adds value, they are likely to be asked to join the team of seni­or con­trib­ut­ors. No more CVs, no more cov­er let­ters: the bot­tom-up mod­el and option­al DAO mem­ber­ship reverses the tal­ent search model.

This is a big step for­ward for three reas­ons. Firstly, we know that tra­di­tion­al selec­tion pro­cesses have a neg­at­ive impact on minor­it­ies because of deep-rooted pre­ju­dices. By elim­in­at­ing these, we can focus on abil­ity. Secondly, this meas­ure is part of the trend towards flex­ible work ini­ti­ated (for bet­ter or for worse) by the “gig eco­nomy”. Finally, it can con­trib­ute to a par­tial reduc­tion of fric­tion­al unem­ploy­ment since there is no time lag between the wish to work and the start of the job.

To ima­gine these new organ­isa­tions, ima­gine that you are work­ing on a film. Dir­ect­ors, pro­du­cers, act­ors, pro­duc­tion assist­ants, art dir­ect­ors, props people, cam­era people and sound engin­eers get togeth­er for a pro­ject. When the pro­ject is fin­ished, they split up and go to work on dif­fer­ent films. In DAO, the same can be said of developers, com­munity man­agers, account­ants, con­sult­ants… In addi­tion, con­trib­ut­ors can work for one or more DAOs.

How do you get paid?

The DAO sells ser­vices or products and sets aside part of the rev­en­ue gen­er­ated for salar­ies and rewards. As con­trib­ut­ors do not have a con­tract, there is no con­ven­tion­al way of decid­ing what every­one should receive fairly. Instead, many DAOs are turn­ing to tools such as Coordin­ape to address this chal­lenge. These solu­tions allow organ­isa­tions to cre­ate “circles” of con­trib­ut­ors (the equi­val­ent of teams). Each mem­ber of the circle receives points and alloc­ates them to oth­er mem­bers over a peri­od of time. The high­er the per­ceived value of the work done dur­ing this peri­od, the more points are received, and the high­er the fin­an­cial reward.

In this sys­tem, one token is equal to one vote. Unlike tra­di­tion­al com­pan­ies, every­one has a vote in pro­por­tion to their par­ti­cip­a­tion in the pro­ject. Cus­tom­ers, who must buy tokens to access a DAO’s offer­ings, are also able to vote on its dir­ec­tion. Your cus­tom­ers become your col­leagues… or even your bosses if they buy enough tokens! Obvi­ously, there will be a learn­ing curve for this new type of man­age­ment. Nev­er­the­less, there is poten­tial for a real paradigm shift.

DAOs solve some of the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with open-source pro­jects, which are often plagued by the issue of com­pens­a­tion. People who use a DAO must get a token to access it, which pays con­trib­ut­ors, but also gives users a voice in the decision-mak­ing pro­cess. In essence, this means that people will be able to earn a liv­ing (or close to it), while work­ing on things they are pas­sion­ate about.

It is a glob­al and asyn­chron­ous way of work­ing. By defin­i­tion, all you need is an Inter­net con­nec­tion to get access and to work.

You say that with the DAOs, web3 gives us organisational power. But isn’t the idea of management wavering?

In the sense in which we know it, i.e. embod­ied in a hier­arch­ic­al chain or pyr­am­id, with “man­age­ment” at the top, yes. But organ­isa­tion, gov­ernance and man­age­ment are real­it­ies that are detached from the fig­ure of the “man­ager” to recon­fig­ure and redefine them­selves in dif­fer­ent terms. For example, DAOs are both trans­par­ent and anonym­ous, thanks to the use of block­chains and smart con­tracts. All decisions and actions can be audited.

It is not only the fig­ure of the ‘boss’ that dis­ap­pears in this mod­el, but also that of our “col­leagues”. This is both a chal­lenge and an oppor­tun­ity. The work­place is a place of social­isa­tion, and the lack of phys­ic­al com­munity and com­mon iden­tity can be troub­ling. But organ­isa­tions can respond by becom­ing more act­ive and delib­er­at­ive when it comes to team build­ing. Sim­il­arly, self-man­age­ment can be uncom­fort­able for many of us, but per­haps we are just not used to it yet.