tl;dr: It comes down to collaboration, flexibility, and shared beliefs.

This TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari, he of Sapiens fame, has been in my head for the past month.

In his usual, far-reaching and broad-ranging style, he explains how it came to be that humans emerged as the most dominant mammal on earth.

The key concept, as far as I am concerned, is how he says that, due to language and our ability to communicate, humans have the ability for “flexible collaboration around shared beliefs.”

The shared beliefs orient us towards a mission, an objective.

The flexible collaboration allows us to re-orient and re-align ourselves, our teams, our efforts, and our work, when change-inevitably- hits us.

Most Human Problems are Coordination Problems

The disruptions of the last few months have accelerated the amount of change with which each of us must contend.

We’ve had to start working from home, while kids are “in school” in the next room, and learn to deal with colleagues through Zoom and Slack instead of conference rooms and water coolers.

We’ve had to learn how to collaborate on our activities where we can’t actually “see” whether our colleagues are getting the job done or not.

We don’t know who’s pulling his/her weight and who is freeloading or coasting.

Yet, we still have goals to hit, missions to achieve, and dreams to realize.

So, we face a choice. Keep doing what we’ve been doing all along, working harder, and flailing.

Or, we can find a new way to coordinate.

That’s where the “flexibility” part comes in.

Whether it is OKRs or cryptoeconomics, there are new ways to coordinate and align available to us, better suited for a world of distributed work, shared resources, and accountability without physical oversight.

Per Harari, some of us will be flexible in adopting these new approaches. Some won’t.