Collaborative decision making is a fundamental skill that every DAO needs.

Making decisions collaboratively is fundamental for any DAO looking to maximize the potential of its participants.

Let’s look at why this is so important and how to do it well.

Decision making is now for everyone.

Organizations designing for decentralization give everyone more opportunity to engage in and contribute to decision-making and decision-making processes.

Innovating on decision making means innovating deeply on organizational culture and values. It means addressing control, transparency and power structures both hidden and explicit. Without the right structure, support and processes this can get messy and dysfunctional, quickly.

New processes to build.

To ensure participation is inclusive and control is distributed, a DAO needs to create robust decision-making processes that are:

🪟 Transparent

Transparency of access and clear record keeping of decisions is critical to ensure DAO participants can understand how things have happened, what has been agreed and engage with context.

⏱️ Asynchronous

DAOs need to be wired for global collaboration by default. This means asynchronous decision making that can work for participants working across timezones.

💡 Effective

Without effective shared processes where people can move from chat discussions to problem solving to decision making, a DAO will stall progress, build up unresolved conflicts and default back to antithetical hierarchical processes.

New skills to learn

Adopting these processes that underpin collaborative decision-making become a new literacy and important skills for everyone in the DAO.

Everyone needs to know who to involve in decisions, and who not. When it’s OK to move fast and when wide engagement is needed. To make major decisions together a DAO needs organizational wide understanding of the background context, the key considerations and the process being used to make the decision.

Getting this right is not easy or automatic. It isn’t solved by code. Technology is an enabler and the right tools can help, but the work requires human skills; empathy, analysis, synthesis, negotiation and communication.

Loomio was built for this.

Loomio is open source collaboration software built to help cooperatives and self managing organizations engage their members and make better decisions together, online. Over the past 10 years thousands of groups have used Loomio to make decisions together online.

Collaborative Decisions Making is a huge competitive advantage for your DAO.

Loomio is a tool that will help you ensure every participant in your DAO can not only engage in decisions but also understand how decisions are made and how they can get involved improving the decision-making process.

If you’re building a DAO and want to make good collaborative decisions together online, and build effective long term decision making processes, then Loomio can help.

Learn more about how Loomio can help transform decision making in your DAO.

Tags: Cooperatives Decision-making DAOs