The Future of Work

I’m getting involved with Zerobase. They are building a 100% private contact tracing app, to preserve our civil liberties AND flatten the curve. It’s exciting, because the speed and self organization of this organization feels different. They have built the organization on the principles found in Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Team’s approach.

They have combined Shared Consciousness + Empowered workforce, rapidly bringing people on focusing on their super powers. In two weeks they are poised to launch in 5 cities. They went from 2 people to 150 in 2 weeks. Every day feels like a week.

They have all the essential ingredients from Dan Pink’s Drive. They have Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery. The purpose – To stop the spread of corona virus while retaining your privacy. Autonomy through empowered execution (mostly using slack and daily calls) – leaders who ask questions, reaffirm the meaning and purpose and mastery – aligning people to their super-powers. Since they aren’t paying salaries, they need to rapidly onboard, give people a sense of the mission. Since people may only have 2 hours a day, they need to not tie them up in meetings, etc.

As Matt Mullenweg says, they focus on the baton, not the runner. I am excited to share some of the lessons I’m learning from their leadership. Running a globally distributed organization with all volunteers – rapidly getting a product to market. What might happen if we ran all our organizations like this? How might embracing remote work create the kind of value and organizations that we always wanted to be in?

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