tl;dr: Whether decentralized or centralized, the competitive differentiator for the next wave of organizations will be transparency.

I was in a Gtmhub call the other day where we were working on refining our messaging.

One of the many challenges that the marketing of Gtmhub encounters is the fact that success with OKRs requires a mindset and culture shift much more than the adoption of a new technology.

The software is merely the enabler of executing OKRs at scale. To make OKRs work (and 72% of first time OKR efforts fail), requires a broad commitment to the mentality behind OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

In the seminal book on the topic, Measure What Matters, John Doerr writes:

“The system is so powerful simply because it is so transparent.”

There are 5 “Superpowers” of OKRs that are unleashed when an organization commits to them, but there is an unspoken prerequisite….a commitment to transparency.

If you can’t see what everyone else is working on, why it’s important to them and the organization, and how they are doing against their goals, you’re handcuffing your OKR initiatives.

During the conversation, one of my colleagues said, rather convincingly, that “there’s no other system around that provides a common layer of transparency throughout the organization to maximize effectiveness.”

To which I said (privately), “well, blockchains do that.”

My point wasn’t to be glib. My point was to build off the idea of the intersection of Crypto and OKRs which I explored the other day.

With everything happening “on chain” or at least many of the transactions and an increasing amount of governance voting, the blockchain-based organization (‘crypto native’) is transparent by default.

Industrial era and centralized organizations are not. However, to benefit from OKRs and unleash the “superpowers,” transparency is a critical pre-requisite.

There are plenty within the crypto industry who will acknowledge that there are cases when a centralized entity is superior (at least for now) to a decentralized entity. So what dawned on me is that, at the moment, it’s less about whether the organization runs “on chain” (expensive and challenging for existing orgs) or centralized (unrealistic for crypto-natives) and it’s more about the culture of transparency that exists within that organization.

My new working hypothesis is that the more transparent an organization is in its workings, the more effective it will be at driving its results. It’s not a guarantee as there will be plenty of transparent organizations that don’t achieve anything, but the opposite, I suspect won’t be true.

Closed, hidden, and secretive organizations will not thrive in an age of low trust.