You’ve heard the hype. You’ve heard the promises of global transformation from… blockchain. I waived it aside as outside of my realm of expertise or study areas due to its finance focus. But I kept coming back to the principles of blockchain and how this accountability tool/platform approach could fundamentally alter the way we work. In fact, it already has for our company on a day-to-day basis.
WARNING: This is a heavy advanced collaboration article. Proceed with caution, and expect to do some research. And, if you make it all the way through, we invite you to join us on an experiment along with one of our cutting edge customers.
FIRST
Let’s leave aside cryptocurrency, bitcoin, mining and where are the hoopla is off to one side and focus on blockchain implications for your day job.
SECOND
Let’s look at the basic principles of work:
1. We know other people.
2. We trust other people.
3. We employ other people.
4. We expect them to deliver what we employ them for.
5. We expect individual and collectively rational decision making.
6. Individuals expect us to reward them for what we deliver.
7. They perhaps should benefit from the overall success of failure of a series of expectations or tasks that are delivered in the delivery of an experience/service
(I recognize the I am using the word ’employ’ when we are moving away from that model, but it makes it much easier to describe how we are changing work by using this language)
THIRD
Let’s look at how tools are changing some of the most core elements of work:
A. Exercise. Your phone. Getting paid for both. Enter Sweatcoin!
B. The visibly rational arguments for making certain decisions is becoming more transparent. You MUST use tech for help making decisions! Enter Kialo.
C. You belong to communities. Make them better. Make them more accountable. Learn from the journalist E. You believe in governance and fairness, and want to create a better platform for your community to understand that structure. Enter Harbour Project.
F. Or you just want to start having a simpler way through your browser without any code so ‘see’ what this distributed web of tomorrow looks like. Ethereum dApps you say? Enter MetaMask. Or why not Status. Or why not have a wallet for this cyberstuff? Enter Token.
And of course, don’t forget about NEO, the real future of our work – because it shares your identity.
There is great potential in building and organizing around the principles that support the above listed blockchain (except A-C) technology. Learn more and check out Encode and Benefactory. Some of these are bonded together by Consensys.
I know some of these ideas are unfamiliar. I write about this because we are actively implementing and using block chain on our own teams and more and more in the products we deliver. Curious to see how we do it? Check out our suite of projects here, and drop us a line here to learn more.
