DAOs and the Mission

tl;dr: Alignment isn’t just an economic or initiative orientation. It’s an emotional one.

Many of my recent posts have been focused on the intersection of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) Methodology to create?Decentralized Accountable Organizations.

One other area of intersection is alignment not only around a strategic initiative, but around mission, vision, and values.

Anyone in the OKR space will tell you that have clarity around the mission and vision of an organization is one of the most important things in order to determine OKR success.

This came to mind as I was reading the reflections of?Ryan Sean Adams after one week of the new Bankless DAO.

Towards the end, in his ‘call to arms,’ if you will, he writes:

Here’s the thing:?you don’t need permission to start a project and squad up. Yes, you probably want soft consensus. Yes, you want to make sure the project isn’t redundant and time wasting. You’ll want to do projects that furthers?the mission, fits the values, and falls in a core category of media, culture, and education—but you don’t need a snapshot vote to start something!

The “soft glue” that binds any organization together, but especially a DAO, is going to be a sense of mission and purpose.

I suspect, and I haven’t been able to prove this in any meaningful way, that the degree of mission clarity an organization has is a key factor in its ongoing success (or failure).

In this respect, DAOs are no different.

People need purpose.