What does professional development and training look like for DAO contributors?

Decentralised organisation building isn’t always easy. There is a landscape of new skills required to work effectively in this way. Building these skills and patterns to create high functioning self managing teams takes time to develop and sometimes the actual skills required are not obvious.

When things start to break down or cracks emerge, the pain is all too obvious...

You feel like you are screaming into the void, sending reminder after reminder and still have extremely low engagement on decision making processes. How are you supposed to get 100+ people to get involved in a decision that actually, they don’t want to make?

It feels like everyone is talking about strategy but everything being actioned is incoherent and chaotic. How do you align people around shared goals and avoid everyone running past each other in different directions chasing different opportunities?

The closer we try to collaborate, the more interpersonal tensions and conflict seem to come up. How do you confront and resolve these conflicts, without ruining the vibe?

People say they are going to do something, then they don’t and projects stall. We all want to be autonomous and keep a high professional standard. How do you hold the right balance between positive vibes and pushing through the pain to get things done on time, at the right standard?

The founder's don’t want to be a bottleneck or maintain all the control, but everyone keeps defaulting back to them. How do you avoid messy mistakes and getting stuck with shadow power structures when delegating authority and control?

These are big questions with complex answers.

If you’re are also interested in these questions and also looking for learning, here are a couple of examples close to the Better Work Together network:

Patterns for Self Organising Teams

For a zoomed in approach focusing on practical teamwork skills and fundamental principles of decentralised organising, Rich and Nati from The Hum have an online course Patterns for Self Organising Teams (with both guided cohorts and learn on demand offerings). Check out the upcoming 6 week training starting June 7th.

Thriving Networks

For a more zoomed out view at a networks scale, Francesca, Alicia and JD from Greaterthan offer an 8 week course Thriving Networks on how to understand and manage value, money and resources flow in a networked structure. The next cohort starts October 5th.

What else?

As more people start to build DAOs and more organisations focus on decentralisation as a key principle, where are the structured opportunities to learn and share? Who is doing this work?

I’d love to find more examples of leading thinkers and trainers working in this space - if you have some to share - reach out!

Better Work Together curates tools, methods and resources from the frontiers of collaboration and organisation building. Learn more about the project at betterworktogether.co