[13] Leaders, Followers and Community
Dear Readers,
Hope you had a great weekend! Can’t believe we’re more than halfway through April already. ⏱🕊
We’ve talked a lot about the future workplace at Life in Color. And while we recognize it will probably look different, we wanted to explore the interpersonal dynamics driving the change. At the end of the day, it all comes down to people … so let’s take a look at power dynamics from this angle.
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We’ve lived in a society organized along the lines of leaders versus followers since the dawn of time.
There is an innate power struggle between who leads and who follows. It’s a structure that looks like a ladder … not everyone can be at the top, but someone is always fighting to be on top.
Some examples: A king ruling over his kingdom. A teacher presiding over her classroom. A CEO leading her company. There can only be one leader, but usually many followers.
Even friend cliques tend to have one dominant “glue” person at the heart of the group. Romantic couples tend to have one person who “leads” a bit more at certain times (and these power dynamics can be fluid and change constantly).
Societies that are organized differently (and buck the trend) are referenced in history books, but not copied widely. And even in these situations, there are still leaders who dictate how the community will direct its resources.
We have explored the evolving structures of Web 3, and now we wonder: does the Web 3 sector also buck the trend of the traditional leaders versus followers model?
Leaders versus Followers 🔼 👑 ❎
In our society of leaders versus followers, the “follower” label tends to have a negative connotation. They teach classes on Leadership, but they don’t teach classes on Follower-ship.
The focus is almost always on the leader, while followers get left behind.
This is very much how our society has operated and internalized the leaders versus followers model. On the internet, we idolize the influencers, but nobody talks about the followers beyond the sheer number of followers an influencer has.
However … leaders need followers – they can’t be a leader without their followers. Without followers … well … you are just alone. 😢
But while followers are obviously important to the equation, society still overwhelmingly rewards Leaders in the existing structure.
So it’s still largely a winners and losers model: The few at the top reap the lion’s share of the rewards at the expense of those they lead. Remember there is only room for a few people at the top of the ladder (or pyramid or whatever metaphor you see fit).
And where you land on the winners and losers model is absolute and finite: you either win or lose (either on top or not), but you can’t be both concurrently.
And society is largely structured so that most of us have to focus on climbing one ladder at a time (i.e. you have one job you devote most of your waking time to).
It’s not whether this model is right or wrong, but what happens if you don’t want to subscribe to this model of leaders versus followers or winners versus losers?
What could a win/win scenario look like?
Toward a win / win outcome 📈 🌟 🙌
In our previous article, we talked about horizontal work models — the idea that people might structure their work across multiple projects. In this world, your role is fluid. You are constantly switching between what you are involved in, where in some efforts / projects, you are more proactive and in others you are contributing passively.
Nothing is constant. You may be a leader in one, but a follower in another.
Instead of a ladder, you might just be a part of many communities and pick and choose where you want to focus. And someone else may have a completely different preference in the communities and projects they want to be involved in.
There is a stronger and inherent need to collaborate, share knowledge, and partner because the average worker has to traverse across many projects and across constantly evolving work culture and dynamics.
So the power dynamics of the traditional leaders versus followers model might change to a leaders AND followers model … one where both “sides” of the coin are fluid and wins are more evenly shared (at least in theory).
Web 3’s Experiment in Communities 🤝
Web 3 is inherently built and powered by communities. Since everything is open and transparent, the strength of the community, their involvement, participation and belief in a project is ultimately what makes a project succeed versus fail.
In a community-driven model, “followers” have more say and actively choose who represents them as their “leader”. The greater the participation under this model, the more the outcome of the project represents its constituents.
But the key for the community model to work is ultimately participation by the community. If we want to move away from a leaders versus followers model, where few make decisions that impact the many … then in order for anything else to get done, the community has to step up. 👟 📈
This is ultimately a governance model question and a question on how as humans we want to organize society.
And of course humans want to organize … our ability to organize into social structures is a defining quality about us as a species.
The question is, will we all participate in that governance? And there is a binary here as well.
Because Web 3 is a participation sport. For all the promises of Web 3 to happen, we all have to participate.
You either participate or you don’t.
You either govern or you are governed.
That’s the big coordination experiment in Web 3. And it’s not perfect right now … you see a lot of things starting to look like governance and economics models of old. Scale and winner-take-all feels inevitable in Web 3.
It’s the grand battle between us versus ourselves:
Humans’ need to organize and coordinate (being in a community)
Versus
Humans’ need for abundance and more (scaling and winner-take-all).
Web 3 can be what we want it to be, but only the participants decide that.
In Web 3, followers play a role and leaders play a role – that’s community. But the outcome has the potential to be win/win. (The potential…)
Pre-Web 3, it was largely win/lose. If I get bigger, by definition, you are smaller; if I build a winner-take-all business model, by definition you get none.
So it was a zero sum game. A leaders’ growth came at the expense of someone else. Or at best, gains were shared unevenly.
In Web 3 though, win/win means we are all in the same community and hold the same assets. However, communities are competing with other communities. So the tendency is still scale.
So maybe scale wins, and we have a win/lose scenario again. But Web 3 has a lot of uncertainty.
And the outcome of uncertainty is hard to predict.
If Web 3 works out, you might get a win/win.
If the status quo doesn’t work, try something else.
Web 3 is something else. 👀