Hey friends,

I’ll admit. I’ve been feeling run down this week. I’m not really sure why.

Maybe it’s the demand of adjusting into a management-like role in Cabin. Or too many meetings (I had 15 this week, including a Twitter space and a Discord Q&A in another DAO). Or too many big, hairy problems and not enough solitude/alone/thinking time to figure them out. Or maybe it's just not enough Vitamin D.

Regardless, I felt less curious and less able to learn. I didn’t want to read or listen to podcasts at all. I also have a pile of clean laundry in my room that I don’t have the energy to fold and put away.

All I wanted to do this week was lie in bed, order takeout, and watch Love Is Blind and play Stardew Valley on my new Nintendo Switch. So if there's more typos than usual, y'all know why.

This week's newsletter reflects my solutions to some work/DAO/web3 problems I faced this week. And without further ado...

Here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week:

1. An experiment on the future of work & compensation —

This week I worked on an article for Cabin on how to decide how much to pay people in DAOs. I won’t publish the entire article here, but I want to share 2 novel comp structures we’ll be trying out:

Team-reviewed compensation splits

As the media guild facilitator, I decide how the total bounty is split between the writer, the editor, and the designer. But this breaks down quickly, especially if I’m not aware of the effort each team member put into the project.

For example, last week we published a comprehensive piece on taxes and accounting in crypto. It had screenshots and 3 graphics, on top of all the research involved. To get the article out on time, our writer took the time to clearly describe the desired output and created mockups for our designer, a newer member of the DAO. Without knowing this, I split the bounty evenly between them, even though the writer had put in more time into the final output. 🤦🏻‍♀️

To avoid this in the future, I envision my teams deciding how to split the bounty amongst themselves. This idea is similar to undergraduate group projects where team members grade each other and the final grades factor in team members' grades for each other.

Retroactive rewards & articles as NFTs

We want to test selling NFTs of our articles as tickets to a DAO operator workshop on the topic, run by the article team. 100% of the proceeds will go to the team, who will have Cabin’s platform and support to plan and run the workshop or Q&A session.

I really like this idea because it aligns incentives amongst all the stakeholders:

1. Cabin produces content and experiences that cement us as the go-to place to learn how to build great DAOs.
2. Writing team contributors benefit from exposure thanks to Cabin’s platform, and get paid for the value they bring to the DAO ecosystem.
3. DAO operators who support the mint receive education and real value from Cabin and the team, beyond just ownership of a nifty NFT.

Once the technology has caught up to our ideas, we can continue building on top of this idea of NFTs to capture more value. For example, a writer could receive airdropped tokens for hitting a certain KPI of impressions of conversions. This allows writers and thought leaders to capture the long tail value of their work and to generate passive income from their work.

2. What to say when DAO contributors don’t deliver —

Folks have started coming to me with questions on how to run DAO working groups. One recurring question is, “What do you do when someone doesn’t deliver or just disappears?”

First off, be ready to do the work yourself. This week one of our writers who had committed to writing our newsletter went MIA on the day we really need to send it. I put out a call for folks to fill in around 5PM EST, but even then I knew it was too late. I had to write the newsletter myself. It was stressful, but it's a risk of the job and the industry. I made a mental note for the future to check in with writers and possibly find replacements earlier.

Second, expect to be ghosted and prepare accordingly. Last week, a few contributors came to me separately about an individual who had say yes to a project but couldn’t fulfill their commitment. They never told the team that they had to bow out and just stopped doing the work and responding messages.

I spent that week brushing up on the situation, finding a new contributor to take their place, and generally being hands on in a project that I wasn’t supposed to spend time on in the first place.

I did some reflection and sent both contributors a similar message. Here it is:

Autonomy is the curse of DAOs: folks can come and go as they please in web3. Most folks have no financial incentive to lock themselves into a single project. There’s no tangible consequence if they leave a mess of half-finished projects in their wake.

But autonomy is also the blessing of DAOs: we have tons of people who can pick up the slack. The way we’ve build Cabin and the media guild is that every person can “plug and play” whenever they want. I don’t need to post a job description or interview applicants to find replacements.

I’m not mad about these incidents. Dealing with contributor ghosting is professional problem I fully expected to deal with as a core contributor. This is why I have SOPs, backup plans, and lists of contributors to help.

But I’ll be fully honest: I now hesitate to give these folks bigger responsibilities that require more self-management.

I hope these folks take this feedback to heart. From experience, I know that there’s few “managers” — in quotes, because I am kind-of-but-not-really their manager — who will be as patient, or give feedback as honestly and kindly as I did. Unfortunately, most will just let you crash and burn or in a DAO, ghost you.

Contributors in a project just have to be humble enough to admit when they can’t fulfill a commitment and let their co-contributors know.

3. “What made your day difficult?” —

In an episode of The Room Where It Happens, legendary retail & DTC COO Kat Cole talks about using MMDD as a framework to help unblock her employees. She uses this as a “feedback magnet” for front liners to surface problems up to executive teams.

GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg A powerful framework for employees/founders: Ask team members what “Made Their Day Difficult” (MMDD) at the end of the day You'll find opportunities in plain sight You're going to love learning about MMDD on this week's @_trwih episode with @KatColeATL pic.twitter.com/oll4Apt7TE January 15th 2022 50 Retweets 366 Likes

MMDD stands for “Made My Day Difficult”. In her previous stint at Focus Brands (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s, etc.), Kat would have an MMDD clipboard for every restaurant employee to write in as they clocked out each day. She would then review the clipboard at the end of the day and address the concerns.

• If she agreed with the feedback (even if she was the one who made their day difficult), she would fix it.
• If she couldn’t fix things, she would make sure they felt heard and give them context behind why she couldn’t fix the issue.
• If she disagreed with the suggested change, she would communicate the benefit of the existing process, policy, or framework in a way that would help them understand the decision.

I tried this framework out for the guild. MMDD turned our community call into a great “office hours” session where contributors left the call feeling supported and upbeat about their work.

• One contributor had a problem with transparency in our compensation structure. I suggested we test out the team-reviewed splits idea (see #1) and asked them to include me in their team call.
• Another felt bummed because his projects had stalled. I made sure to tag him to write an SOP for another project he was involved in.
• Another contributor needed help expediting our podcast production because other members of the team were dragging their feet. I suggested a fix to reduce back and forth between the team, and jumped in to revise the draft myself.

I was really happy with the results so I’m testing a weekly cadence of MMDD to coincide with our community calls.

This could become a daily, monthly, or seasonal ask for our contributors and teams, depending on how quickly things are changing in the DAO. Kat says, “The less change, the less often you need to ask. The more change, the more often you need to ask.”