Hi all, I’m looking for some feedback on a research topic I’m attempting to form. Could you help me better refine for the DAO culture?
My ongoing research in cognitive science has shifted in the last year beyond management towards sociology more generally and explicitly, social ontology. The premise of this sub field of sociology is focused on the nature of society and its agent-structure relationships.
Historically my action-research focused on fit between management layers and team capacities in orgs seeking to become more decentralized. Today I see a broader need to look at agency and structure as independent but intrinsically related causal forces to which many organizational and collective intelligences topics can be linked.
I will focus my work this year with DAOs who see a need to enhance their structure-culture fit through encouraging more agent centric practices/processes.
My starting place needs to be with how individual people understand, make sense, and meaning of their work with DAOs.
This is where you come in.
Could I grab 15mins with each of you to practice my research interview protocol?
I’m interested to learn where you are when you think about the specific DAOs you are members of — not in the sense of a demographic location, but in the terrain of your life work.
This interview is focused on uncovering how agents make sense of self in relationship with others in real-time. The interview transcript reveals a snapshot into the potential an agent has to de-center them(self) to locate the “other” in a more authentic way but also their risk of temporarily losing their sense of self by becoming too caught up in the needs, expectations, desires of others — thus depreciating their agency.
I believe research like this is necessary to be introduced independently in itself, but also linked to structural innovations for improving DAO culture. Today DAOs predominately use digital infrastructure oriented; incentives, economics, and memetic strategy to mobilize DAO cultures ideally so members act in more de-central, self managed ways. However, the quality of a DAO’s structural design (including infrastructure) depends on the self-initiative on behalf of others. The quantity of agent-structure relationships (at scale) of a DAO depends on the quality of its member’s agency just as members depend on the infrastructure. In other words, the degree they can be linked depends on their separability.
Once refined, I believe the interview should reveal some very counter intuitive results which if utilized, could improve DAO’s cultures significantly and help encourage more people to use DAO as a means to pursue their life work as the DAO structure can adjust to more effectively meet the agentic needs of its member’s self-other relationships.