DAOs and Their Operating Systems: Observations and Aspirations with Sam Spurlin

Sam Spurlin is a partner and first employee at The Ready, a future of work consultancy. Over the past eight years he has partnered with and advised many organizations on their journey toward more people positive, complexity conscious, and effective ways of working. He has worked with senior leaders and their teams across many organizations and industries in the Fortune 500. He led The Ready’s exploration into DAOs in late 2021 through early 2023. Prior to joining The Ready he consulted with David Allen on the updated edition of his bestselling book, Getting Things Done, and published with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the future of work and positive psychology.
All organizations, even decentralized and autonomous ones, have “operating systems” that describe how they work and what they feel like to participate in. These operating systems are the foundational assumptions, principles, and practices that manifest in everything we might call “organizational culture” — and they can be designed. Using the OS Canvas as the primary lens, how and why are DAOs suffering from many of the same challenges traditional organizations face? What might the organizational operating system framework tell us DAOs may be uniquely situated to do better than traditional organizations? And what might it take to make that happen?