Distributed Decision Making
COVID sucked.
Like a Dyson vacuum.. But it had its perks.
The good always comes with the bad, it has to. It’s a universal truth.
COVID freed employees from the confines of a cubicle, while giving employers no choice but to hire the best of the best from anywhere in the world.
It forced us to slow down, and with all that time we got back from long commutes, it gave us more quality time with the people we love.
But like any good economist will tell you, there is always an effect with cause.
COVID, the effect, caused companies to have to figure out a way to streamline decision making, and the meetings that take place where decisions are made.
This became especially difficult for Web3 startups where decision making not only needs to happen quickly, but it’s usually made more democratically than in any other sector. Additionally, teams are distributed across the world and speak in many languages.
I’ve personally worked with entrepreneurs from India, Brazil, China, Mexico, Australia, Africa, Canada, the UK, and 90% of Europe.
I love Web3; It’s a total melting pot of the world’s brightest minds.
It’s a black hole; not letting the brightest talent from the biggest Web2 giants escape its gravity.
Don’t agree? Well 6% of Americans quitting their jobs to work in crypto full time in 2021 doesn’t care with what we think.
Democratizing Decision Making
I love Web3, because nothing is more democratic than a technology you don’t even have to trust because it’s open, transparent, and immutable for everyone to see.
Elections of the future will be done on-chain, and everyone who participates within an ecosystem will be able to have a say; they can vote with their wallets.
Right now we see this playing out with DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
Sure the larger decisions can be put to a vote where everyone can participate, however there are hundreds of decisions that need to be made on a monthly basis and have to be made quickly to keep the ship moving, Entrepreneurs who fail to make decisions quickly fail.
But how do you make decisions in an industry where democracy is vital to uphold?
Who is responsible within a given organization to make a decision and when is that decision so impactful that it should not be made by the founding teams but rather put to a vote within the wider community?
At Probably Nothing we found ourselves running into situations where we struggled to make the bigger decisions. Either because we wanted to be respectful to have everyone’s voice heard, or we just didn’t have a process for which the person accountable should make the decision.
Sure our creative director was responsible to get the website done, and or our head of marketing was responsible to get a survey complete, but within those projects there are hundreds of smaller tasks that need to get done and if any of those tasks fail the larger project is at risk.
Responsibility Versus Accountability
There is a difference between responsibility and accountability. I might be responsible to get a task done, but somebody else might be accountable for the success of the whole project.
You have to have the buck stopping with one person when it comes to a project. If you don’t things fall apart.
I’ve always built companies with a culture that celebrates decision making and I strongly believe the person closest to the decision, or the one who will be the most affected by it should make the decision.
Let’s use this in a story example. Let’s say we want to create a logo for our upcoming Product Ø, and to accomplish our goal of a logo we all like, a brainstorm session is needed.
At that brainstorm session we come to an agreement that I’m going to introduce our head of marketing (Kid Lash) to two different agencies to get quotes from them to design our logo and he will go ahead and manage the process for us. When it’s all said and done, however, design falls underneath our creative director.
So if I fail to make those introductions and therefore Kid Lash has nobody to manage and we miss our deadline of getting the logos done, who’s ultimately accountable for the project missing its deadline?
Was it me for not making the introductions? Was it Kid Lash for not bugging me enough? Or was it PD our Creative Director because he’s ultimately responsible for design?
There are many different ways you can set up accountability, but accountability means that a domain falls under one person and if anything within that domain fails then they fail. And if they fail enough times then they no longer get a chance to continue to work on the project.
Sure I had a responsibility to make an introduction and I failed to do it, but I’m not accountable for design, PD is.
So where does this leave us?
Areas of Accountability
Well when you have one person accountable for a domain then you better believe they’re going to follow up with the people who have responsibilities to tasks within a project because it’s their ass on the line.
Having one person accountable will ensure your project gets things done, and more importantly, that people know who they should go to speak with anytime something arises and they need to get something done or ask a question. If you don’t have accountability things break down.
We saw this as an issue at Probably Nothing so the first thing we decided to do was create a list of areas of accountability within the organization that ultimately someone is accountable for, by department and owner.
By having areas of accountability we are saving a tremendous amount of time when it comes to knowing where to go for information, and it takes the burden off of any one person from having to create and hold a meeting.
Meetings Reimagined
For almost any major decision any successful entrepreneur will tell you that they rely heavily on their advisers and mentors. A founding team is no different, they are your support in thinking through critical decisions that have to be made and then helping to execute those ideas.
Oftentimes when teams come together to meet and brainstorm or make a decision, they find themselves not being able to make a decision fast enough if someone is not ultimately accountable for that meeting and the success thereof. Also, with distributed teams globally around the world, meetings need to be efficient.
If you have a meeting that runs for one hour and you have six people there, you’ve now just burned six hours of team time. It quickly adds up. I can assure you that everyone who attended the meeting was probably not critical to that meeting and now you’ve just wasted an hour of their time when they could’ve been doing something else.
Meetings fail in a distributed world sometimes because of the simple and avoidable nature of tech. Everyone is using VoIP, and if they have a bad headset or a slow internet connection, and they’re asking somebody to repeat everything they say, the rest of the attendees too quickly check out.
Likewise, if there is no agenda upfront for a meeting and people don’t know what the desired outcome of the meeting is, it just becomes a meeting for meeting sake. If we aren’t making progress at these meetings we can quickly check out and people start to lose faith that anything will be accomplished.
Last but not least, if people are just showing up to meetings without preparing, then meetings can go a lot longer. Not only is preparation ahead of time important for everybody attending the meeting, but it is also important that meetings are time-boxed and end exactly when they say they’re scheduled to end.
Meetings that continuously run over are taxing on a team and it’s another thing that causes them to lose faith in the process.
So now with our areas of accountability in hand, we decided to tackle our meeting process. It only makes sense that the person accountable for their specific area would create the meeting that they want to have, and invite the people that they needed at that meeting. It’s better to keep meetings smaller and only with the people that can provide input so the meeting can end on time.
With all of these things in mind we created a form that every team member who is responsible to host a meeting fills out ahead of time and circulates to ensure that…
- Everyone who needs to be there is there, and that they receive a calendar invite to ensure that they do not miss their meeting and understand how much time of theirs that the facilitator needs from them.
- The meeting ends on time
- Attendees are prepared to meet, as they understand the purpose of them meeting and the desired outcomes.
- The list of action items are captured and tasks are created to keep everyone responsible and accountable.
Below is a sample of this form already filled out based upon the story example I gave above around creating a new logo.
Meet Sheet:
Subject / Topic: Logo Design
Area of responsibility: PD
Required Participants: PD, Fungibles, Lash
Optional Participants: BCP
Purpose: Come up with new logo design for ProductØ
Desired Outcome: The marketing team is in agreement with the general direction of what the new logo design should accomplish, taking our sage brand archetype into account. After we have agreed upon the direction, we will reach out to two different agencies to have them work on two different versions and we will select the best one.
Structure (select one): brainstorm session, problem solving/decision making
Time: 30 minutes
Background info/ Pre-work:
Please read ahead of meeting https://astute.co/sage-archetype-brand/
We need to come up with an icon for the logo that signifies collecting NFTs that people can get as soon as they see it.
I want to brainstorm and capture all of the things that come to mind when someone thinks of collecting NFTs.
Attendees:
Lash, BCP, Audie, Fungibles, PD
To learn a more philosophical approach to web3, Join the Probably Nothing discord community.
