Original author: olly.eth

Original compilation: H.Forest Ventures, 0x123

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This paper introduces the special ability of DAO due to its organizational structure, which can help organizations develop better as a new search tool. It also expounds the advantages and disadvantages of the company's hierarchical system, and compares it with the DAO organization, showing the advantages and particularities of DAO more vividly.

As a collaborative network, DAO is likely to show its unique role in the future. To determine its role, you need to think outside the box. Like a toddler taking his first steps, today's DAOs are immature, unstable, and likely to stumble.

While it's tempting to skimp on them, especially in "serious" innovations, their structure does make them uniquely capable of being vehicles for exploring and discovering new things. We'll briefly describe its structure, and accomplish the following:

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Searching for Novelty—Another Paradigm for Discovery

Imagine yourself now at the edge of a lake, and you try to reach the other shore, and have to do this by jumping over stepping stones on the ground. However, the fog is so thick that you can only see the nearest stepping stones at your feet. The coast fades away behind you as you move forward over the stepping stones.

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Stanley and Lehman (2015) liken the above case to search discovery. The lake represents an abstract space of possibilities, while the stepping stones represent navigational strategies. Your journey is one of constant exploration in this space of possibilities. The question is how do you move forward when you don't know the road ahead.

We can redefine this by considering the space of all possibilities as a room. Now imagine yourself as a painter and try to create the next Monet in your room. As a search space, our rare diamond is already there. Your purpose is to go around numerous pointless dead ends and find it.

When you create, you search the room. Every time you visit a room, your artwork will be partially influenced by those rooms. If you spend time studying Modernism, chances are you've been influenced by it. Without going to a watercolor corner, it's unlikely you'd invent them. The lake problem is here again. How to become Monet? Where will the stepping stones lead us?

We can think about all complex domains this way. We know there will be new discoveries once we get to the other side. Unfortunately, we can only see the stepping stones under our feet, but we cannot see anything else.

Like vacuum tubes, no one knew they would enable the first computers. It was only after the discovery of the vacuum tube and the associated computing that the possibility emerged that a computer could be enabled using a vacuum tube so that someone could tie it together. If you started building computers in the 1800s (as Charles Babbage did), you're unlikely to gain this insight.

We tend to think of intermediate steps as small goals towards the end, and use these small goals as stepping stones to get there. However, when we don't understand where we are, these small goals can easily get us into trouble.

It's entirely possible that moving closer to the goal doesn't actually increase the value of the objective function, even though the move brings us closer to the goal.

"Why Greatness Can't Be Planned" — Stanley & Lehman (2015)

Taking the education example again, we measure educational progress based on test scores, assuming that higher test scores mean we are getting smarter. "Improved math grades! That's great, right?" False. Optimizing math performance through evaluation forces us to focus on things that improve performance in the short term, but prevents us from exploring a larger search space.

So are there other options? Of course, a novelty search is a non-objective form of search. Instead of stepping toward seemingly stepping stones to the end, simply collect stepping stones that lead in interesting directions. Focus on the new, wherever it takes you.

Because ultimately you have to acquire some kind of new knowledge to continue innovating, which means that novelty search is a kind of accumulator of information about the world in which it occurs. The longer the search goes on, the more information about the world you end up accumulating.

"Why Greatness Can't Be Planned" — Stanley & Lehman (2015)

Every stepping stone you collect opens up new possibilities. New ideas often come from combining existing ideas: combining different stepping stones. Every now and then, a certain combination will take you into a whole new situation.

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Focus and expand

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A company is a convergent vehicle in pursuit of a single vision

Great ideas often come from independent thought that collects and synthesizes an unusual set of stepping stones.

Companies are hierarchical, with one person leading and ultimately responsible for decision-making. Companies are ideal structures for ideas that require the power of many people to realize, because leaders have the power to optimize resources to pursue their vision.

It's a feature, not a bug, that makes a company strong, but it can also make it vulnerable. A strong leader with a vision can lead a company to incredible success; a weak leader with a short-sighted vision can't accomplish much and can actually be harmful to the company.

In any case, the company's focus is to unite everyone to achieve specific goals, making everyone work towards a common goal. This is"strong alliance", that is, everyone works together to achieve a convergent outcome.

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Firms use goals to pursue convergent outcomes

The advantage of hierarchy is that it allows the collective to pursue a single vision set forth by the leader, and coordinate the work of individuals to achieve a common goal. To do this, companies must carefully define the problems they want to solve and stay focused by breaking down goals to measure overall progress.

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DAO is an extension tool for exploring domains

DAO is a network defined by nodes and links, corresponding to people and relationships.

The network has a flexible topology that can be flexibly changed according to changes, and the shape adopted will evolve and update over time. Leadership is assigned on a case-by-case basis, with individuals empowered to make meaningful decisions that change organizational structures without permission or consensus. We can call this ability self-organizing ability.

Imagine deploying large networks like democracies. A nation is made up of many individuals and organizations that contribute to its growth and improvement. Yet the complexity of a country is such that no single entity, not even the president, can appreciate it as a whole.

Instead, each entity is embedded in its own environment, such as a local community, business, or social circle, and understands the country in its own way to make decisions that affect its environment. As they make decisions, such as starting a business, voting on a government, or forming new relationships, the structure of the network changes meaningfully.

Likewise, in a full-fledged DAO, individuals can understand parts of the network, but they cannot understand it as a whole. Individuals will understand DAO in their own way, and can explore directions that can affect their own environment without considering the overall environment. - As they make decisions, the structure of the network will self-organize accordingly.

The network has an information advantage due to this mechanism. Everyone knows themselves better than anyone else and decides for themselves how they can best contribute.

It’s clear that aspects of individual effort—talent, motivation, workload, and focus—fluctuate in small increments over the course of each individual’s day, let alone months, making it impossible to normalize and price them . Organizations that adopt a hierarchy are a medium that gets lost. All information that may be relevant to the decision-making of each factor of production, but is not introduced in one form or at one location, making it entitled"included in"The agent's decision is lost.

The Penguins of Kos - Yochai Benkler (2002)

Networks also allocate members more efficiently, since anyone can fill any role, and the network benefits from the best mix.

For any given set of programs, even without changing resources and collaborators, the productivity of different people will vary and fluctuate widely. Peer production has an advantage over firms and markets because it allows larger groups of individuals to scour larger resources for materials, projects, collaborations and combinations.

The Penguins of Kos - Yochai Benkler (2002)

At the same time, the token creates a mechanism of "weak alignment", where everyone in the network has an incentive to increase the value of the network. However, the means by which this value will be realized is unclear.

Therefore, DAOs are not suitable for pursuing a single vision. They are optimized for exploring many different visions simultaneously, and individuals can make different decisions based on their own circumstances. This is a feature (not a bug) that will be the powerhouse of the future web.

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DAO is a container for many weakly aligned teams

DAOs and corporations have different organizational characteristics due to different core structures. However, this does not mean that they are mutually exclusive, quite the contrary, a DAO can be seen as a container for many weakly aligned hierarchies.

Great ideas often come from individual minds, and leadership is essential for effective human collaboration. Hierarchies are optimized to enable strong leaders to achieve great results. DAOs cannot get around this fact. Hierarchy works because it enables leaders to combine contributions from their teams.

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Local alignment of actions, from globally heterogeneous to locally homogeneous. We can observe this pattern everywhere, from magnetism to human society.

The following problem often arises in hierarchies due to groupthink: a gradual inability to consider other perspectives.

Homogeneous groups are good at what they are good at, but they gradually lose the ability to research alternatives.

The Wisdom of the Crowd - James Surowiecki

In a network arrangement, each team understands its own direction on its own terms and contributes what they believe will add value to them without being locked into a single vision or narrative. No consensus or compromise is required, as each group has the right to self-organize.

The best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and competition, not consensus or compromise.

The Wisdom of the Crowd - James Surowiecki

In this way, a single DAO can be viewed as a multi-organization network. In the past, these structures have struggled to exist due to a lack of technology required for coordination. Now, the weak consensus of programmable tokens provides an incentive for every team to cooperate and share information, and open blockchains make information sharing easier and easier.

Its key principle is heterogeneous (or, to use another term, "panarchic") collaboration among members scattered across multiple (usually small organizations) or parts of an organization. Network design has historically existed, but multiorganizational design structures are now able to gain strength and mature as new communication technologies allow small, dispersed, autonomous Consultation, coordination and joint action in problem areas.

Tribes, Institutions, Marketplaces, and Networks—David Ronfeldt (1996)

Future DAOs will benefit from the best of both worlds. Strong, unified hierarchies that achieve convergent results at local scales while exploring many different directions that collaborate to improve the state of the whole.

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tools for exploration

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San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk, Claude Monet, 1908

As we've established, goals aren't very useful when we don't understand our circumstances. Instead, we should collect stepping stones that lead in interesting directions when we don't know where we'll stop.

Companies help us jump between single stepping stones by using hierarchies to pursue a single vision. However, it is difficult for companies to get beyond that vision because the same mechanisms prevent exploration of broader search spaces.

The magic of DAOs is that they allow many cooperative teams to collect different stepping stones to embrace complexity. These stepping stones can be shared, reused and combined in new contexts to lead the organization in new directions.

With people and information as its components, DAO is a system for exploring and generating discoveries.

A generative system...is a package of parts with rules about how those parts go together. almost every"overall system"all by a"build system"Generated. If we want to manufacture as"overall"Things that work, we have to invent generative systems to create them.

Systems Generating Systems—Christopher Alexander (1968)

Therefore, DAO is an open evolutionary mechanism. In other words, evolution is open: not only can it generate solutions to current directions, but it can gradually open up new directions.

Instead of seeing openness as an existing condition or property of an evolving system, we see them as a consequence of evolution itself.

Openness to evolution, not evolution to openness - Pattee & Sayama (2019)

So, the core of the argument is this: DAOs are novelty search engines that explore a search space more efficiently by having many collaborating teams collect and integrate stepping stones.

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