Software and Protocols for a new way of Organizing — with Bryan Peters, Rob Solomon & Sascha Kellert

Podcast Notes

In this conversation, Simone is joined by several guests who have experience to share in the field of Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organisation, aka EEEO or 3EO.

The first one is Bryan Peters, co-founder at Sobol.io — an app that helps teams visualise and manage dynamic organisational accountability structures — and is focused to explore what opportunities live at the intersection of human collaboration networks and decentralised technologies like the Ethereum blockchain.

We’re also joined by Rob Solomon, founder of Cone, which is an application that enables companies to organise themselves as a platform, where teams operate and interact with one another in a marketplace as if each were its own autonomous startup. Rob also worked with ConsenSys, Zappos, and The Downtown Project on various experiments with Holacracy and marketplace dynamics.

Finally, we’re joined by Sascha Kellert, the Founder of Rekursive, a venture-backed startup building the ownership economy aimed at making it easy for platforms and creators to make any person a co-owner in their business — simply through the web without lawyers or notaries.

In this episode we discuss the 3EO ecosystem concept and the impact of the ownership economy. Tune in to learn more about how crypto can help design powerful new incentive structures and visual tools, and striving to work from a shared grammar.

To find out more about their work:

• Bryan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-peters-3125373/
• Sobol: https://sobol.io/

• Rob’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/robmsolomon
• Cone: https://www.cone.network/

• Sascha’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/kellert
• Rekursive: https://rekursive.org/

Other references and mentions:

•  Viable Systems Model by Stafford Beer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
•  Last mover advantage: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/last-mover-advantage
•  Phantom equity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_stock
•  Corporate Rebels Articles by Rob Solomon: https://corporate-rebels.com/rebel/robsolomon/
•  EEEO Toolkit: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/eeeo-toolkit/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 5 May 2021

Key Insights

1. There seems to be agreement that some common patterns are emerging among pioneering, often self-organizing organizations, which use some common building blocks to allow for small teams to work closely with ensuring market fit. This does not mean reducing complexity, but — like Bryan has found with Sobol — “complexity and emergence can come on top of sometimes a shared language or a shared ontology”. And this, in a way, can be seen as mirroring some of the ideas of how nature is organizing, carefully balancing generalizable patterns with complexity.

•  Listen to the discussion around shared patterns and grammar from around min 13:39.

2. The evolution of platform capitalism requires us to rethink incentive structures through ownership and benefits sharing. The guests ponder on this topic, with Sascha pointing out that “if you really want to build an ecosystemic organization, then the only way that’s going to be successful is if it’s possible to have a shared identity, and shared decision criteria and rules, but also a lot of autonomy on the local level, and you can only achieve that if the underlying ownership structure allows for that”. As with ownership, most current incentive structures do not work at the network level, which makes it difficult to compete with established, centralized networks, since the incentives are not there for those who really lift the network up from the ground. This is a nut that the EEEO and 3EO — through their ecosystemic nature — are seeking to crack.

•  Listen from min 28:13 on thoughts on ownership and incentives structures.

3. Beyond the ownership/incentive structures, there is also the question of leadership and participation in governance. Blockchain constitutes a breakthrough on a core infrastructure level, providing a scalable framework for participatory governance, but participation is not always naturally granted. Better user interfaces and more efficient execution are both needed to make blockchain technologies really usable. Yet, Rob highlights that “Blockchain isn’t a panacea” and that “we’ll never have perfect, perfect solutions, where the will of every single person is immediately and perfectly reflected in the projects they contribute to”. There is also the confrontation with the “old world” paradigm, begging questions for pioneers as to how to build this decentralized future, within current constraints of legal frameworks. This is the experimental ground where products like Sobol, Cone, and Rekursive are moving the needle in terms of the future of organizing.

•  Listen to the final round of reflections on ideas around governance and blockchain technologies around min 33:29.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.