Working with Lore

One day the mariners’ collective imagination perceives the spectre of the Flying Dutchman on the oceans of the new world: ‘blood red the sails, black the mast’. Aimlessly, the helm damaged or washed away, and every now and then without a living crew, it haunts the floods—a gloomy memorial in an optimistic age—and it dooms those crossing its way with a curse of aimlessness and life-in-death.
The Flying Dutchman. 1826

Work is changing. More people are collaborating remotely than ever before. This trend started before Covid, and while some organizations want to bring people back into the office, its clear that the cat is out of the bag. This has unfolded in parallel with advances in communications technology. From humble improvements in software that make collaboration easier, to profound breakthroughs in value infrastructure that enable groups to collectively own and manage capital, the result has been a proliferation of novel organizational forms. DAOs are managing large pools of capital and stewarding significant protocol. Platform co-ops are gaining tractions. Even some legacy institutions are making the leap, reorganizing themselves into horizontal and distributed forms.

This explosion of organizational creativity comes hand-in-hand with a promise to solve the biggest workplace challenges. Imagine, being able to detach earning potential from location, achieving better project fit with a more divergent, diverse pool of contributors, or being able to allocate work more efficiently by empowering people to organically join in as needed. All of this is within sight. While these aspirations drive organizations, the actual contributor experience does not always hit the mark.

It's no secret, distributed organizations are young. The technology which supports their operations is in its infancy. Breaking the patterns of legacy organizations takes time. Plus we're still discovering the possibilities inherent in these new organizational forms.

In the midst of uncertainty, one thing is clear: people, especially online, are animated by an illusive thing called lore. Lore unlocks the potential of distributed teams, but putting it to work is difficult. This is because lore resides at an individual level, and exists as separate yet synchronous mental models, and systems of symbols. Despite its ambiguity, lore is foundational for distributed organizations, establishing an ongoing aesthetic and narrative framework that promotes the creation of group knowledge, enables effective decision-making, and improves the coordination of autonomous actors.

We are primed to leverage lore. The remote workplace is already a landscape of language. Communication lives in the chat room. The mantra for many is "default to writing." Lore is constantly being built—the challenge is to carve out space, celebrate, and elevate lore within our tool stacks and operational practices.

The need is urgent. Distributed organizations are occupying mission critical niches that demand performance. At the same time, many of these organizations are struggling to deliver on the promises of the future of work. In the midst of a bear market, the challenges of growing a contributor base means that making the future of work work is no longer a compelling experiment, but a matter of survival.

Zooming out, our challenges are profound. This is a moment of narrative collapse. As we face problems at a planetary scale, establishing common cause is illusive. When exploring the challenges of coordination, the outcry for better narrative infrastructure often follows. We have the ability to leverage this opportunity, but only if we recognize that the new organizational forms emerging from web3 and beyond are not just as vessels for the shared stewardship of capital but also the lore that gives meaning to our work on this earth.

In part two of this series, I'll explore the nature of organizations and how they coordinate work by helping people solve information problems. I'll contextualize this with a brief historical overview of organizational control methodologies. This will lay the stage for an examination of the characteristics of distributed organizations, demonstrating why lore plays a critical role in horizontal coordination problems.