DAO Incubator designer and facilitator

Context

The DeepWork design studio is a collective that operates in departments, it promotes innovative organisational design through ownership of the design process. I joined the studio two years ago and since then, my role as facilitator and researcher has performed in different project. My latest engagement is the DAO Consultancy department. As the DAOs ecosystem keeps growing, the future of work and the culture of a new ways of organising teams require structured experimentation. It is pivotal to embrace internal focus and alignment to enable better work and life conditions, facing global challenges. In the department team, after an internal experimentation and ideation phase to deliver a DAO service, in October 2022 we launched and completed the first DAO Incubator with three DAOS team from the Celo Ecosystem: ImpactMarket DAO, Africa DAO, CalPoly.

Approach

As part of a collective effort, in a team of 6 facilitator, we delivered five sessions – Branding, Mission and Vision in 2 session, Value Proposition, Project Scoping and Retrospective – with each of the three teams. My focus with the Lead Facilitator was on ImpactMarket DAO.

The customised workshops helped to embrace shape your impact to advice their products and services by signalling opportunities, where support might be needed; outlining solutions, where we propose an approach to turn weakness into a positive evolution; suggesting exercises, in which we highlight which exercises were the most impactful during the sessions; and feedback, to suggest an intention for your team how to move forward. We addressed the three teams scenarios in one document as we also believe and support learning exchange between teams.

Outcome

In the three teams scenarios, in three weeks of work in October 2022, we validated how DAOs face problems such as, moving forward slowly due lack of organisational flow and internal coordination. Another clear challenge and opportunity to develop is the scalability. As an internal team result, the DAO Incubator pilot workshop and project can address the next DAO ecosystem. We are developing and evolving the structure to improve our own direction and impact in other ecosystem. The next DAO Incubator is under progress.