Iterative DAOvelopment

Transcript

hello hello hello and welcome back to the forest stage a very special guest kyle burke from mochi come on up give him a hand [Applause] thank you very much yes exactly okay super so uh hello all my name is kyle burke i'm the co-founder of a agile dow coordination game called mochi where we turn agile into a staked coordination game for you and your members to play with in your dao what we do is we encourage members to set goals form teams share insights and

distribute tokens autonomously but we'll talk more about that a little bit later what i'm here to talk about is how we evolve organizations that may very well be the future of work together and in order to do that i'm going to be starting by uh using a lot of references to the human body and this is because i've been an athlete my whole life in high school and in university and despite playing at such high level i've been dealing with pains and discomforts in my body it's been you know fairly consistent in my life for the past few years and i've dedicated the past five years to studying biomechanics with functional patterns biomechanics is the study of the structure and function of biological organisms in order to better understand how i can get myself out of

these situations how i can get myself out of pain and discomfort and what i've discovered over the years is that there's a lot of interesting crossover there's a lot that we can learn by looking at organizations through the lenses of the human body so as you can tell my left foot is a little bit different from my right foot i have a collapsed arch and you know my ankle tends to roll inward and this is one of the symptoms of a greater problem within my system so one of the first things that i want to introdu introduce you to in relation to you know the body and and organizations is the idea of tensegrity structures and a tensegrity structure is actually the emerging model of how the human body

is organized tensegrity structures like the one you see pictured here is comprised of both hard and soft components elastic materials that are very interesting because they are much more adept at adapting to stress than more rigid um you know physical structures and i think that this model was really interesting and something that we can learn from the idea being for the human body that the the bones in your body are not simply stacked on top of each other they are actually floating in your body and they are held together in place by the soft elastic tissue that is our muscles our ligaments our tendons also known as

the fashion network and so um i think we can learn a little bit about how this thing is structured how we incorporate it in our own bodies and how i how we might be able to learn about organizations through this thing so again a compression system a compression structure is much like a brick wall that you see on the left where things are just simply stacked on top of each other there tends to be a higher pressure and the things that are lower in the system than things that are higher in the system where a tension um structure is much more like a sailboat or like the human body where you have opposing forces in it right so you have the mast that's going up holding the sail in place but you also have these cables that are holding the mast in place as well

and so organizations are actually kind of like this right like dao's the the main value network of daos is the connections between its members it's not necessarily just the individual components it's how they all connect and they form together there's often as we can see in the sailboat example there's components that seem to act in opposition of each other right so you have the the thing going up and the cables holding it down um in the human body we have this as well we have our biceps and triceps that worked in opposition to each other if you look at how the human body is operated you have the ankle that bends one way a knee that bends the other way and hips that tend to bend the other way but

this system works together with opposing forces to make a more stable structure and i think dows need this as well it's not all about having the same vision of the future or the same you know value system it's about having opposing value systems that you can discuss and share together and hopefully build a more vibrant network together so um one of the things that i think is really interesting when we're talking about humans and we're talking about organizations especially in when we're referencing systems both the human body and organizations are systems systems tend to have two main features one that they're a group of interacting

or related elements that's kind of like the interior portion and then the exterior portion that they are surrounded and influenced by the environment around them and um if we think about humans humans if we look at the elements of the human body what we actually find is that we're talking about systems within a system so if we say like the muscles and the organs and the arteries are a part of what makes a human a human we're actually talking about circulation system the digestive system respiratory system things of this nature so we're like this inception of systems where there is a system in a system and we see the same thing in daos right like what are the

main components of a dao well it's the people within it we already know that people humans are are their own living systems um if we're talking about what sort of technology you uses maybe they are information systems or maybe they are governance systems they're governance structures and so you know we kind of have this systematic approach that we need to take and that's really important because systems are very fascinating in a sense that affecting one part of the system can drastically affect other parts of the the system i think one of the most um you know interesting examples of this were the reintroduction to grey wolves into the yellowstone national park for people who don't know the story wolves

were hunted to extinction in as early as the 1920s and humans decided to to reintroduce them to the park because we as humans eradicated them it wasn't a natural process so what we did was we reintroduced about 30 wolves back into the park and what scientists discovered was that there was a higher biodiversity after wolves were introduced than before which seems to contradict what we would imagine considering these are apex predators top of the food chain but what happened was the wolves hunted the elk and deer and the elk and deer were were over proliferated in the area because they didn't have anything to hunt them when there was less elk and

deer there was more trees that could grow tall when there was more trees there was more birds when there's more birds they're spreading the seeds everywhere when there's more trees there's more beavers more beavers to build dams when the water table rises there's more fish there's more bears and so on and so forth so you have this cascading effect that happened just because of one small relatively simple change uh in the system that scientists at the time couldn't have foresaw happening so i think that's really interesting when we think about how these elements all relate to each other and now i want to give a little anecdotal story about when we're talking about the the environment how we're affected by things that are potentially

outside the system um so this is a photo of the biosphere 2. um this was a science experiment conducted i believe in the 90s by a team that was interested in learning whether they can build an environment in places of extreme conditions or even in other planets to see if they could produce food and provide life in a sustaining way so that humans could then live in these extreme environments and one of the things that they learned was trees growing inside of this place did not actually live to maturity they would fall over and die before they started producing fruit and they didn't understand why

does anyone want to take a guess there wasn't wind there wasn't a stress on the system that could provide the strength for the wood to be able to grow tall and strong there wasn't anything pressuring it to make its roots grow wider and longer and stronger and i think this is really interesting to think about because we're in a bear market you know like it's actually not such a bad thing this is a unique opportunity to prove that like we are capable of of handling stress we are capable of you know kind of bringing the vibrancy of life that is a reaction to what's what's going on

around us so um there's this concept of uh infinite games all systems whether they know it or not are playing the infinite game um the infinite game was introduced by this author james cars in a book called finite games and infinite games and it's a it's a separation of the way we view the things that we're doing in our life and whether we're playing things in a finite way or an infinite way the main difference between these two being the rule sets and the objectives for playing this game so finite games are things like sports games you know debates eating competitions things like that where you tend to play because there is a winner

or you want to win and there is a defined rule set for how you go about playing this game and it's usually agreed upon ahead of time before the competitors agree to play infinite games on the other hand may not even have rule sets there might be natural laws that kind of govern the thing but there's no referee to blow the whistle on whether something was legal or illegal um and the idea is we should be playing these games to just continue playing them right like in a good conversation you want as many people playing as possible to make the conversation as enjoyable for as many people as possible and to potentially keep playing until you're blue in the

face and you can't talk anymore so things like things that are infinite games are things like conversations evolution in life i'm playing an infinite game trying to solve the problem of my my left foot and my discomfort so that i can continue playing the infinite game of life into old age and be happy and vibrant and healthy while doing it whether you guys realize it or not you're all here because we're all cooperating in the infinite game of web 3 and building the the future of of human organization right so you know props to you guys for for coming out to this but you know that's that's what we're all here doing um so

you know the question might be okay we're playing an infinite game so like what do we do what's what's what's the strategy how do we go about doing it i have some insights i have two that i want to share based on you know my progress through this infinite game thus far the first being understanding historical context so if you look at the the structure of the human body it's actually a result of how we've used it to function over hundreds of thousands of years if not millennia um we are primarily walkers runners and throwers and why is that because we've done those things over and over and over repeatedly

for very long periods of times we have literally shaped our bodies to be this way by repeatedly doing it over and over and it's what we are incredibly efficient at so very often you know if people are going back to the gym or they're trying to figure out how to get healthy one of the things that i've learned is that you need to orient yourself around these functions that are very innate to what we do a baby doesn't go straight from crawling to running it needs to go through the walking phase so what does this mean for organizations well what we might be able to say is and this is kind of a cliche as a as a developer um but like don't decentralize from day

one and that may be very true we need to understand the historical context that organizations exist in right like we come from very centralized systems where you're heavily dependent on those in the decision-making sphere to be able to do things that you you know think are correct or empower you to be able to act in certain ways and we want to get to this utopic future of decentralized autonomous organizations but we we can't skip those steps we need to understand that we need to to move through this middle ground of you know getting from point a to point b and it's important that we acknowledge that and if we want to build

the organizations in the same way that we've built our bodies we need to have repeatable patterns that we do over and over that are productive and useful for building the future that we want to build so we might not be able to jump to decentralized right away but we might be able to slowly start to decentralize decision making or communication channels or things like that so that's uh that's step one for me step two is the the concept um that we should be focusing on software before hardware and this idea i've taken from you know working on my body for for a very long period of time and it's the idea that

behavior change is much less metabolically expensive than hardware change so it is possible to change your body it is possible to move your bones it is possible to to change your form but really the only way you can do that is by changing the simple patterns simple patterns change muscle density which then pulls on your bones in different ways which then creates a new system and so this is a law that was developed by a german anatomist where the idea is bones can actually remodel themselves over a period of time based on the load that is applied to it so if you see people who are you know mainly sedentary compa compared

to runners or or football players they will have different structures based on how they use their body our our hip bones might not all be the same and so it's really fascinating to think about how you might be able to to move yourself into the type of form that you want if you view tennis players if you take a look at the bones inside of their tennis playing arm it's thicker than in the bone in their non-tennis playing arm and that's because the shock waves have you know repeatedly hitting a tennis ball make it make it stronger and more dense and i could say this with a certain degree of assuredness because this is actually a difference in my footprint

from one year um it's taken a lot of time it's it's taken a ton of effort it's taken repeated activity it's taken behavior change in order to get there it's actually quite funny because i didn't know that they would be having real grass on the stage here but one of my simple behavior changes was wearing less shoes i needed to develop the the strength in my feet to be able to provide an arch for myself and you know i through testing i'm now able to see that you know it's something that i'm capable of of doing i'm getting closer so if we're talking about software versus hardware

i co-founded a company with a couple friends called mochi and uh the idea is um we want to help provide the software to build a better hardware for your dow or for your remote team and we work off of these first principles that we cannot build a better dow without better contributors big changes happen because of small consistent repeatable action over and over goals are achieved by building habits around them and continuously doing them members should reflect on their progress working in public benefits both the contributor and the dow and we have an emphasis on playing as a team if you want to go fast go alone if you want to

go far go together and members should finally be accountable to themselves and to others so if this sounds like something that interests you come talk to me i'm wearing a mochi shirt i'll be around all day big hair hopefully you can find me um if not check out our website mochi.world to learn more about our system our game and you know come find and chat with us you know i really appreciate you guys taking the time to come to this talk or even all of you online streaming tomorrow i'm hosting a workshop with frothy frothy and colonel and it's centered around how we make the member experience better endows so if this is something you want to actively work on and you want to join

our design workshop we'd we'd be happy to have you um and at this point i want to wish you but nothing but the best in the infinite game of life all the best you