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2019 is on the other side of the watershed

People being asked to return to their workplaces – as the pandemic recedes in the West and Asia – have some new perspective:

“I’m typing this from my office where I’m the only one in my suite and have been all week. More colleagues are physically present across the building but all my work is done on a computer and I have no reason to interact with them in person. It’s just the old logic that you’re not really working if you’re not in the office.

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This to me is the most significant way in which work will change in the near future. It’s less about the specific technology we use for chat, calls, knowledge gathering or such. And more about what people interact with each other for.

Once companies begin thinking about these, they’ll very quickly need to deal with more fundamental inter-personal matters, about trust and autonomy, about cultural fit, about incentives. All of these will look quite different from today for a company that wants to move beyond the simple binaries or remote/local, home/office.

Finally, the “metaverse” is a term that several companies, notably Facebook, are using to describe a shared immersive space for people to work in while being physically in different places. While it’s early days, it’s telling that the idea of that shared space is, essentially, a low-fidelity replica of a typical office.

This is a snapshot from Facebook’s video from last October introducing what work could look like:

Once again from Facebook, an actual product named Horizon Workrooms.

And some photos of a product from the “virtual office” company Challau.

Having people’s avatars ‘sit’ at an office desk and look at a projected screen, stand before the boss’ table while he/she speak with them doesn’t seem to take advantage of a blank canvas, free of physical constraints. More fundamentally, these designs may reinforce the same obsolete organizational characteristics that we discussed at the beginning of this post.

I think these choices are in part a conscious choice by companies to give people a sense of familiarity as they ‘return’ to office. But it seems to me that truly distributed, global organisations will be structured fundamentally differently and use very different tools.

Decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, seem an interesting experiment. Without getting too deep into their details, governance and incentives for these organizations are typically encoded in ‘smart contracts’, or in code that lives on a blockchain. Per-member rights are weighted by the number of organizational tokens each person holds – as are profits. Projects and tasks are taken up by DAO members because of the incentive of rewards associated with them, making them as close to self organizing as we can imagine today. DAOs transcend national boundaries, and (typically) by existing parallel to existing legal structures, are able to minimize administration.

Now there are cases for which DAOs are suboptimal, or are much too unweildy to operate compared to more traditional organisations. Regardless, they’re interesting examples of trustless, borderless – and maybe limitless – systems for organizing some types of work. For the purposes of this post, the most notable thing about them is just how different they are organised from existing companies.

Whatever the organisations of the future look like, I think the tools they’ll use to collaborate will look very different from Facebook’s office-in-the-metaverse products. Those offices are 2019, and 2019 is decisively on the other side of the watershed.

(ends)