The Infinite Game is Played on the Margins

There is a Ted Talk by Simon Sinek where he speaks about a concept called the Infinite Game, which is the idea that success is accumulated by those businesses who build and sustain strong and healthy organizations.?There is an equally interesting but seemingly unrelated Ted Talk by Jamie Bartlett speaking about how the Dark Web is going mainstream.?While the Infinite Game is being played in many places, I often feel it is most frequently played by those operating on the margins.

In the technology world, those on the margins are people who are pushing the front-edge of the technology curve.?One of those areas I find increasingly interesting is what’s called a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).?In simple terms, a DAO is an organization that is distilled into smart contracts most commonly hosted on the Ethereum blockchain.?By taking this approach, an organization removes humans from any activity that can be distilled into code typically leaving people to handle governance, most often through distributed token voting.

One way to think of DAOs is to look at today’s credit unions.?They exist to serve their members and are a non-profit with the purpose of redistributing profits in a manner that best meets the needs of its members.?Most often through reduced fees, higher savings rates, lower loan rates, community engagement, personalized services, among other benefits.

Now imagine if the core operations of a credit union were coded into smart contracts and members were given tokens with which they could vote and control the operations of the credit union.?In the world of DeFi, this is happening as many of today’s financial services are replicated on blockchain technology leveraging programmable money (cryptocurrency).

Non-financial services are also being created as DAOs and some companies like ShapeShift are pioneering dissolution of their corporate structure into a DAO.?This is very early stage – truly on the margins.

Often, many of the creators of DAOs are pseudo anonymous.?This is done to make their DAO censor-proof, which has many upsides and downsides depending on your risk appetite.?This means, once their smart contracts are on the Ethereum blockchain, they will continue to operate according to the rules of their code indefinitely given that Ethereum is global, decentralized and contracts are immutable.?By being pseudo anonymous, it makes enforcing regulation difficult and remedying poorly designed code sometimes impossible.

Circling back to the Dark Web, all types of services are finding their way into these decentralized technologies.?For example, I moved my personal website onto a decentralized file system which is frequently combined with Ethereum to host content like NFTs.?It’s easy to do, fully decentralized and will persist indefinitely.?Imagine doing the same with an organization’s operating model and digital assets.?While I feel this is all on the margins, there is something intriguing and powerful here that Chief Technology Officers like myself should understand.

Given all of this is early-stage technology, passionate communities are being built around these technologies and working together to create a new culture.?Some of that was evident at the EthCC conference (https://ethcc.io) and many other conferences around the world this year.?

To me, this looks like people playing the Infinite Game on the margins.?If you want to stay on the front edge of the technology curve, this is an important space to explore.