DAO is Paving the Way to a New Kind of Decision Making for Organizations
| Updatedby Maria Konash · 4 min read
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a number of decision-makers in both public and private sectors across the world make poor decisions that will undoubtedly make it into the history books in years to come.
There are far too many cases to look at each one individually, but consider Yahoo’s poor decision not to sell itself to Microsoft, or the time when AOL bought Time Warner over 17 years ago – a deal that is still cited as the ‘worst merger in history’.
In many cases, ourselves and our families have had to face the consequences of these bad decisions that we had no say in.
The Importance of Decision Making for Organizations
Making the right decision is a huge pain point for many organizations – whether large or small. Large organizations and global corporations tend to have more resting on the outcome of their decision. Making the wrong decision could result in billions of profits lost, and public shame and embarrassment. As a result, there is lots of pressure to get it right.
On the other hand, smaller organizations tend to have more internal pressure resting on their decisions. Unlike larger corporations, they rarely have a safety net to fall back on. One wrong decision could make or break their entire company, leading to the loss of hundreds of jobs.
Can Technology Help Us to Make Better Decisions?
The rise of blockchain technology has opened up many new possibilities we’d never previously considered – from improvements in the supply chain management and logistics industry, to completely revolutionizing the way dating apps work. Now the big question is – could we use blockchain technology to improve our decision-making?
You’ve probably already heard of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) – a decentralized business model designed to revolutionize the way we organize both commercial and nonprofit enterprises. But you probably haven’t yet heard of DAOstack – the new blockchain application that is working to enable the effective governance of self-organizing collectives. It effectively acts as an operating system for the DAO.
The DAOstack platform enables faultless execution of crowd decisions through its decentralized governance system based on Ethereum smart contracts. It has been especially designed to empower frictionless cooperation at a collective level in order to promote effective decision making.
For the first time, decentralized ownership will become a possibility. Organizations such as charities, decentralized investment funds, and insurance networks will be granted the ability to share value between stakeholders, thus enabling crowds to co-own and co-manage assets and funds.
As a result, companies and organizations will be able to self-organize and scale at any stage of their growth, while maintaining accountability and agility. It could be the solution we have been waiting for.
Eradicating ‘Decision Paralysis’
In most organizations, decision making is usually left to single individuals – often senior executives of the company, for example. When there is so much resting on the outcome, making a final decision is difficult, and often leads to ‘decision paralysis’.
However, once a decision has been made, very few companies choose to ‘reengineer’ them. Bad decisions can be catastrophic and are often difficult to reverse.
Over the past few years, organizations have generally become better at making the right decisions. After all, it makes sense. We have more data, advanced analytics, and intelligent algorithms at our fingertips to help us than ever before. What’s more, leaders are becoming much more aware of cognitive biases that can lead them to making the wrong decisions.
However, it’s not all good news. The way we communicate has changed drastically over the past couple of decades. The rise of email, Slack, and various other online platforms has meant that the cost of communication has significantly decreased.
The result? Too many meetings, and too many people and too few high-quality conversations. Projects like DAOstack could be the solution we have been waiting for.
A New Future for Decision Making
Despite the implementation of new tools designed to make the process of decision making easier, many would argue that our new rapid-fire communication style and increasing organizational complexity have made it harder to confidently make decisions than ever before.
The path to making better decisions does not need to be longer, and it certainly does not need to be made more complicated. To ensure a future of better decision-making, we simply need to untangle the messy web of accountability that we have got ourselves lost in over the past few decades.
Thankfully, it seems the arrival of blockchain technology is right on time to help us do just that.
