tl;dr: Number-based organizations coordinate better than language based orgs.
I had the insight this morning that it’s not so much crypto, DAOs, OKRs, social media, or tech that really interests me as much as the question of coordination.
“All problems are coordination problems,” I thought, congratulating myself for the realization, only to have the awareness immediately dawn on me that I think I heard that somewhere else.
Be that as it may, and since it doesn’t really matter anyway (we’re all interconnected anyway and there’s nothing new in the universe as it is), the point felt very valid.
Once you get beyond yourself (I’m talking in a practical, not a metaphysical way), you’re in the coordination business.
Since we know that most great things require the efforts of more than one person acting alone, we’re immediately confronted by a coordination problem.
Who should do what? When? What does success mean?
Any time information is relayed from one entity to another, some of the signal is lost. That’s, as I understand it, the definition of signal decoherence. It’s like the game of “telephone.”
When dealing with large groups, the amount of signal decoherence increases over time and space. As a result, there’s a form of strategic decay and organizational drift that inevitably results.
The way to combat this is with improving communication.
For most of human history, we have tried this with language, written and spoken. However, that ultimately breaks down because of the nuance of meaning, varied vocabularies, and localized phrases.
With cryptoeconomics and with OKRs, the international language isn’t English, it’s numbers.
Since everyone (well almost everyone) understands what a 10% improvement on 100 is, you don’t need to worry as much about communicating shared key results beyond that.
Same with crypto. The consensus algorithm is the same, no matter what country you are from or what language you speak.
Systems that are fundamentally based on numbers as their OS will, I believe, ultimately be more effective at coordinating large groups of people toward common goals.
This is why crypto and OKRs will win.
