The RnDAO Podcast

Jillian Grennan, an Associate Professor of Finance and Law at Santa Clara University, recently visited the University of California, Berkeley. She joined us to discuss the interactive role governance and culture played in scaling organizations. Leveraging years of research in corporate culture and governance, she highlighted how best practices in governance differed with DAOs (e.g., referencing her paper on optimizing decentralized governance). Additionally, she explored methods to enhance culture in a decentralized setting (e.g., mentioning how emoticons and other digital forms of empathy can help). Through her lecture and Q&A, she provided builders and DAO community members with practical tips for growing and strengthening DAOs.

Jon Alexander studies the history of cooperative movements and shares lessons learned about how decentralized communities can create bridges that inspire larger socio-political change.
Jon is author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, and co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a book and company that work to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. Among other plaudits, CITIZENS was recently listed by McKinsey as one of its Top 5 Recommended Books in its Summer Reading Guide 2022, described as "an underground hit" in the Financial Times, and selected by the World Economic Forum for its CEO Book Club. Jon began his career with a decade in the advertising industry, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year, before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring Consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. In CITIZENS, he is ready to share them with the world.

Matt Barney, Ph.D. is an Organizational Psychologist, serial entrepreneur and founder of XLNC, a consulting, training and psychometrics firm that solves difficult business problems with psychological science and innovative technology. Previously, he was the Founder and CEO of LeaderAmp, an award-winning platform for expert and Artificially Intelligent coaching and assessment until May of 2022. In his 25+ year career in multinationals such as AT&T, Motorola, Merck and Infosys, Dr. Barney has innovated interdisciplinary science and technology resulting in four patents, ten books, 43 peer-reviewed works and over 200 keynotes.

​In 2020, LeaderAmp won the AI Award for Human Capital Development. In 2018, his team won two competitive international awards from the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology and the Association of Test Publishers. Since 2014, he has served on the Business Affairs committee of the board of not-for-profit scientific publisher Annual Reviews. He holds a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Tulsa.

Satoshi’s original goal was to create technology that overcomes the historical disasters of centralized, untrustworthy social systems. DAOs have potential to change that but from Mt. Gox, Three Arrows Capital, to rugpulls and FTX, human sources of risk are still limiting the full potential.

​This presentation will briefly review Enterprise Risk Management history before introducing the relevant interdisciplinary organizational science of individual, team, and organizational risk management. It will introduce meta-analytically supported evidence from traditional organizations that likely generalizes to DAO management. At the same time, it will review other findings such as Cialdini’s ethical persuasion science, which is likely even more important in a DAO than in a traditional firm. The latest, metrologically-oriented, objective psychometric methods are ideal to detect and mitigate these risks in DAOs, but when these computer-adaptive assessments are deployed on Web 2.0 infrastructure, they suffer from all the traditional limitations of legacy cloud/mobile technology. This is unhelpful for realizing the full potential of DAOs.

​The presentation will close with a vision for research that ultimately results in novel smart contracts, and multisig NFTs to systematically assess and mitigate these organizational risks in ways that are immutable, appropriately transparent, censorship resistant, and effective in reducing risks and potentially helping DAOs become “antifragile”.

Tim is the co-founder of scenarioDNA a research consultancy that advises global clients on how to leverage cultural trends. Tim is also a Part-Time Associate Teaching Professor at Parsons the New School of Design where he teaches trend analysis and design strategy.  He is the co-inventor of a patented methodology of Culture Mapping that analyzes patterns in language using computational linguistics and machine learning to identify and visualize trend narratives and forecasts. His work helps companies understand and leverage the dynamics of cultural change for a broad range of innovation challenges from new product and brand development to horizon scanning. Clients include Honda, KEF Acoustics, IKEA, Nike, Hilton Worldwide, and Verizon.  Tim is also a frequent speaker on topics related to culture, society, and trends and has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, USA Today, Vogue, Fast Company, and Quartz.

​Culture is a story system. Today's challenges require a social science approach to analyzing culture and applying actions in sync with the natural cycle of power and dissent, from protest to policy. We can see the results of shortsighted and top-surface methods to cultural insight imploding around us. From greenwashing in the midst of a climate "permacrisis", to the commercial laziness of relying on celebrity influencers for relevance that quickly devolves into toxic hate speech. Culture matters. But our strategies need to reflect that. In this talk, Tim will explain how the concept of Culture Mapping can help us understand the system of language and stories and speculate and cultivate divergent possible futures.  New prompt engineering tools like Midjourney are rooted in language and cultural bias.  If we can unlock the linguistic system of culture we can take a more a more generative yet expansive approach to make our future more sustainable.

​Dave started work in an NGO post-University and then moved on to HR & Training in the late 70s when he started working with computers. That together with a diploma from The Certified Accountants got him a job as Development Accountant in the same firm where he headed up the Treasury function and was responsible for computerisation. An MBA in financial management saw him move into consultancy and software designing decision support systems in what became Data Sciences where he became a General Manager (creating MURCO) and the Corporate Business Development Manager where he created the Genus Programme (an integration of JAD/RAD, Object Orientation and Legacy Management) which was one of the main components in the turn around of that company. IBM acquired the company 1997 and, after that, his more public career started.
At IBM, he was a director of The Institute for Knowledge Management and the Cynefin Center, and in 2004 became the founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company.

​The Cynefin Co has worked for almost two decades in partnership with academics, artists and complexity scientists and has been taking a fresh look at the whole process of design. Bringing the evolutionary concept of exaltation (radical repurposing of traits) and work on weak signal detection for unarticulated need mapping representing some of the outputs of this process. The use of distributed ethnography is changing the way we design health services as well as society in general and this has been pioneered by Dave Snowden and his team.

​Lana is a Filipina, now based in the Netherlands, who designs spaces for “KAPWA” (shared inner selves) to flourish. She guides founders, community leaders and changemakers in re-imagining, designing and facilitating spaces for belonging, liberation and healing.
Lana is the author of the book: Community Builder Designing Communities for Change and she is also the chairperson of the Neurodiversity Foundation, and co-founders of Community Rituals and Neurodiversity Education Academy.

Engagement is a big buzzword, and it's one of the main metrics that we, as community builders, weavers, founders, measure our communities. Asking our members to be highly engaged has a pitfall - It carries with it an expectation that there is one right way where members are expected to participate, a specific tempo or energy that people need to bring in to the community or organization. I prefer to see engagement as A SLIDER. We need to provide differentiated means for people to engage in ways that are nurturing for them. Engagement means empowering people to connect, contribute, activate, support and respond in ways that are regenerative. This means we take into account the depth, breadth and focus that is possible for an individual in a given moment.

Deep Democracy is a mindset and toolbox for inclusive decision-making and conflict resolution, using collective intelligence and group dynamics. It focuses on building trust, connections, feeling heard and valued, strongly believing that the real power of organisations lies in the strength and resilience of the relationships between people. Leen is a trained deep democracy facilitator and trainer. She is co-founder of All for Climate and co-spark of RegensUnite. She is also active in various local community projects.

​Continuing with our knowledge exchange sessions between the world of self-management and web3, we're happy to host Francesca Pick!
Francesca’s work is dedicated to creating organizing structures and cultures that contribute to a more healthy system for all. As founding partner of Greaterthan, Edmund Hillary Fellow and co-lead at Cobudget, she guides, facilitate, and trains organizations and teams on the topics of participatory governance, network building, self-organizing, collaborative decision-making and budgeting.
In this short talk, Francesca will share common myths and misconceptions about what leadership is and is not in the context of self-management and decentralized governance. She'll share useful concepts, practices and perspectives that help groups truly step into shared leadership.

Jamie Joyce is the executive director and founder of The Society Library and has been focused on modeling societal-scale deliberation, developing decision-making models, building libraries of knowledge, and offering educational content on complex issues.

​In this talk, Jamie went through the methodologies used by The Society Library to collect the arguments, claims, and evidence from across all media types, and how they bring all of this knowledge together and structure it so that everyone can get both a birds-eye view over a particular issue, and also be able to dive down as deep as they want, to find out all of the argumentation that refutes or supports a particular claim.

​Bartek Starodaj is currently the Director of Housing for the City of Kingston, New York. In this role, he manages housing-related grants, supports the construction of new market-rate and affordable housing, and develops policies to provide stability and protections for that need it most. Bartek is also a founding board member of the Kingston City Land Bank. He has served as the Board Secretary for three years helping to ensure that the organization’s activities live up to its mission to expand housing accessibility for Kingston’s citizens and that its programs reach households that are currently underrepresented among the city’s homeowners.

​Prior to joining the City of Kingston, Bartek was the lead account manager for two marketing agencies. He also served on the German Marshall Fund’s Urban and Regional Policy team fostering transatlantic development initiatives for major U.S. and European cities.