🌿🧭🌳 OD67: Circularity x strategy x communityship x DAOs 🤯
Circular Economy System Diagram, Dimensions of Strategy, Organizations like Communities, DAO Landscape
Join 4,000+ others who get our bi-weekly Strategy & Organization resources on Business Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development and adjacent fields like Change ∙ Foresight ∙ Complexity ∙ Leadership and others.
#practice
Circular Economy System Diagram
This diagram, created by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, illustrates some useful distinctions for the practice of designing circular business models (highlights ours):
MAINTAIN/PROLONG (& SHARE)
This innermost loop of the technical cycle shows the strategy of keeping products and materials in use by prolonging their lifespan for as long as possible through designing for durability as well as maintenance and repair. These longer-lasting products can then be shared amongst users who are able to enjoy access to the service they provide, removing the need to create new products.REUSE/REDISTRIBUTE
Technical products and materials can also be reused multiple times and redistributed to new users in their original form or with little enhancement or change. Marketplaces such as eBay are proof of this already well-established approach.REFURBISH/REMANUFACTURE
Remanufacturing and refurbishment are two similar, yet slightly different, processes of restoring value to a product. When a product is remanufactured it is disassembled to the component level and rebuilt (replacing components where necessary) to as-new condition with the same warranty as a new product. Refurbishment is largely a cosmetic process whereby a product is repaired as much as possible, usually without disassembly and the replacement of components.
RECYCLE
Recycling is the process of reducing a product all the way back to its basic material level, thereby allowing those materials (or a portion of them at least) to be remade into new products. While this is undoubtedly an important process in a circular economy, the loss of embedded labour and energy, the necessary costs to remake products entirely, and the inevitable material losses mean that it is a lower value process than those closer to the centre of the system diagram, such as reuse and remanufacturing.
Dimensions of Strategy
Interested in having a new perspective in your own strategy development work?
Here’s a diagram that we’re using as a reference in our practice, based on the Patterns of Strategy concepts that we covered back in OD37.
See the hi-res details and download the one-page PDF here:
What dimensions are you usually focusing on?
#reflect
Do you want an organization like a community?
#study
DAO Landscape
Now, here’s a pick for fellow Strategy & Organization geeks. Ever wondered about how the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) landscape looks like nowadays?
Enjoy the explorations triggered by this synthesis article (highlights ours):
(…) we’ve spent the last five years distilling what it means to coordinate digital working groups.
DAOs are internet communities with a shared cap table and bank account.
Members work together to create, distribute and capture value relative to a shared mission. Ownership shares economic, social and political components, creating best practices for digital coordination.
Today, there are more than 100 DAOs managing over $10B in assets.
DAO Operating Systems
(…) make it easy for anyone to start a DAO with limited technical skills.Grants DAOs
Communities donate funds and use a DAO to vote on how that capital is allocated to various contributors in the form of governance proposals.Protocol DAOs
(…) provided a framework for any network to issue a token that was (hopefully) owned and operated by its community.Investment DAOs
(…) allow members to pool capital and invest in projects at their earliest stages.Service DAOs
(…) are talent allocators, using on-chain credentials to funnel and allocate resources from one DAO to another.Social DAOs
Where social media turned everybody into a media company, Social DAOs turn every group chat into a digital business.Collector DAOs
(…) seek to curate which NFTs have long-term value.Media DAOs
(…) break down the way in which writers, streamers, and readers engage with the content they release. Whether it be media mining programs to incentivize contributions or governance over which topics make the front page, Media DAOs turn consumption into a two-way street.It feels inevitable that tokens will eventually replace equity, and with it - so will the legacy legal structures that underpin them.
Thanks for reading
We hope you found something useful in this edition. See you again in two weeks!
This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.
As Strategy & Organization professionals, we're partnering with visionary Tech companies to help them address their most complex strategic & organizational challenges.
Our professional mission and intended legacy is:
Creating and sharing sustainable knowledge that helps people deal with the complex challenges they (will) face.