🎾 Intro
Imagine you’re playing doubles tennis with a new who you’ve never played with before partner every round. Sometimes, you and your teammate both go for the ball and crack your heads together. Sometimes neither of you go for the ball, simply locking eyes as the ball sails between you. These kinds of errors can be avoided with clear communication - but when you have dozens of proverbial tennis balls flying at you and many heads to avoid colliding with, a system becomes vital.
How we work together is changing. Teams are increasingly cross-functional and collaborative, roles are changing almost as soon as they’re written, and contributors need to adapt at an ever-growing rate. The complexity of an organisations working environment isn’t captured anywhere with true accuracy - making it hard to collaborate effectively or have clarity on a teams human potential. In a world full of interconnected apps, dynamic UX/UI, and a growing web3 environment - we’re still using Word documents and PDF’s for our Job descriptions.
The Supermesh system seeks to address this by tokenising the responsibilities and roles that we each hold in the teams we’re in, and storing those relationally to the various teams they relate to. Supermesh doesn’t give you ownership of tasks; it gives you ownership of responsibilities to your teammates as defined by you and those you work with. This allows everyone to collaborate more effectively, and work at a more rapid pace than ever before.
🙇 The Problem
🤝 Pt. 1 - Collaboration
🧬 Work has evolved
As technology develops faster and faster, so does the way we work together. Formerly rigid, hierarchical institutions are being forced to adapt as their younger competition run laps around them with more egalitarian, collaborative ways of working. Where we used to have corner offices, we now have desk pods. Where single reporting lines once stood, we now have many stakeholders to consider in the work we do. Work is more nuanced, complex, and changeable than ever before. As the SaaS industry - the primary driver for this way of working - matures, it’s workers are evangelising these approaches into every other industry. The Big 4 now have Agile Coaches, Governments have public servant product owners, and the cultural components of these ways of working are dispersing into every role in an organisation.
🧑🧒🧒 Org Charts
30 years ago, double denim and babydoll dresses were all the rage - and org charts could accurately represent an organisation’s structure. While the style choices have made a come-back over the years, traditional org charts have fallen further and further out of fashion.
Traditional org charts assume we only report to one person, that your team works in isolation from others, and emphasises a top-down management style that’s as out-of-date as skinny jeans are.
📄 JDs
While roles are becoming increasingly cross-functional, they’re also becoming more and more adaptive and changeable. Depending on the nature of your role and the organisation you’re working with, your JD might be inaccurate almost immediately after joining the team. Job Descriptions act as a fuzzy prediction of what people in your organisation think is needed in your role - often times reality doesn’t match this prediction. Business needs change, teams adapt to the different skills of new talent, and most importantly - most roles involve many responsibilities that are implicit, or too small to list in a JD.
The current tool-stack of PDF’s and performance spreadsheets prevents team members from having clarity on current responsibilities and goals - things will inevitably fall between the cracks. Teams need a tool that is easy to update based on both an individual’s skills and the organisations needs.
👩💻 Remote Work
The rapid adoption of remote work as COVID swept the globe, and the corresponding reaction away from it, deepened cracks that were already set into the cornerstones of western work culture.
With more distance came slower communication - and less of it. There’s a lot of rhetoric currently circulating against remote work; attributing it with a loss in productivity. Contrary to this, plenty of workers choose to work from home because it’s more productive for the nature of work they need to do at that point in time; allowing long periods of focus without distraction from work matters they don’t need to prioritise. This, along with a healthier work-life balance that is becoming increasingly desirable for people, makes remote work something that organisations should work with - not against.
The challenge with remote work isn’t one that should be attributed to contributors - instead, organisations should consider how they can improve communication and collaboration with teams regardless of their location or proximity.
🔀 Cross-Functional Teams
As we become more bottom-up in our ways of working, decision-making responsibilities like ideation, strategy development, and more are being distributed across many more roles in an organisation. Alongside this, modern workers are encouraged to take initiative in solving problems before escalating them. Contributors have a growing need to connect with their teammates and understand their talents and skills in order to better equip themselves in both of these endeavours.
We see this formalised in some team structures already; for example, squads are set up to bring together cross-functional specialists from across the business, ensuring projects and initiatives can move at pace without stalling.
⚛️ Part-time teams & micro-orgs
Many smaller organisations that have a range of part-time contributors or a distributed team of volunteers struggle with coordinating work when schedules don’t align and contributors are transient in nature. These organisations need a system that can make the jobs-to-be-done tangible, and assignable to those who are available.
🧑🔬 Work is still evolving
While many legacy organisations are striving to bring their teams into our current ways of working, many teams are looking further ahead - imagining the next iteration of work. Themes of self-governance, distributed leadership, empathetic management, and shared ownership are consistently emerging in both theory and practice. Despite bright lights on the horizon, we still have increasing reports of burn out, quiet quitting, quiet firing, dissatisfaction in the workplace, and lost productivity.
🙋 Participatory Democracy
Participatory Democracy is on the brink of it’s own Cambrian explosion. Voters are increasingly dissatisfied with a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and increasingly opaque political messaging that leaves citizens feeling disempowered and unrepresented. Tools like Citizens Assemblies are a provably effective way at combatting this - but require a unique style of facilitation that is often hard to find.
🏡 Pt. 2 - Belonging
🪞 Identity is relative
When we think of who we are - when we picture ourselves as individuals, we don’t do this in a vacuum. We think about who we are to our family, to our friends - and to our colleagues. A significant part of our self-image comes from imagining how others perceive us. When those expectations become uncertain or unclear, our identity - who we are in relation to the group - is called into question.
🗳️ Belonging requires consensus
Groups and teams are more productive when there is belonging. We cannot have belonging without consensus; belonging requires the individual to identify with the group, and the group to in-turn identify with the individual. The process of finding belonging in any team or group is a gradual and iterative one, wherein both individual and group adapt and evolve to accommodate one another. This is especially true for new group, but also applies to individuals entering into already established groups/teams.
🪟 You can’t have consensus without transparency
Consensus is literally mutual understanding and agreement; you cannot truly have either without informational parity and openness from everyone in a team. Therefore, you cannot have belonging without transparency; and if we don’t have belonging, our identity in a group or team is left in question.
📣 Belonging requires communication
Transparency, Consensus, and therefore belonging all require communication. Not just when the group forms, but constantly. Like a group’s culture, it’s formation is inevitable; so it’s upto those forming the group whether they want to consciously form belonging and culture, or to let it form implicitly and in the shadows, where it can no longer be observed, directed, or nurtured.
🏚️ Tyranny of Structurelessness
This leads us to the crux of the belonging problem in modern teams. As Jo Freeman states, any informal structure is still bound by many of the traits accepted by formal structures; power dynamics don’t go away when we drop the tools we would otherwise use to keep them in check. Much like culture and identity, they persist whether we pay attention to them or not. When our roles and responsibilities become implicit, we see this same tyranny play out. When there’s opacity, nobody wins.
🔧 Pt. 3 - Current Tools
The biggest challenge we face with current tools when thinking about roles and responsibilities is that almost every solution is object-oriented; everything is built to serve the task at hand at varying levels. This is incredibly useful for lower-level coordination and tactical operations, but becomes less and less useful when considering high-level decision-making, fast-paced collaboration, and turning strategy to action.
✅ Task Managers
Task Managers are the most simplistic solution, but deserve recognition as one of the first true B2C / non-enterprise examples of productivity software. Task managers weren’t just object-oriented; the object was the entire thing. All you had was a task, a binary tickbox to denote if it was done or not, and possibly a due date. Task managers are designed for single users doing simple tasks - there’s no room for collaboration or considering how tasks are inter-related.
🏗️ Project Managers
Project Managers were a natural evolution to Task Management Software; nesting tasks in the broader contexts of the goals they were created to reach. This category still remains incredibly object-oriented, though - the job of figuring out who does what is navigated off-platform, and it can often be challenging to bridge the gap between different teams’ ways of working if a project requires multiple teams.
💁 HR Tech
HR Technology is currently going through a boom; from rapid growth and innovation in payroll software, to Onboarding, Cultural insights, Compensation management, and more. To date, these innovations haven’t touched on the primary purpose of contributors in a team; to contribute. There remains a large gap between HR technology and project management software - a gap that’s leaving a lot of productivity on the table.
🔁 Workflow Managers
While workflow software are much more common at the enterprise scale, project management tools are building this feature-stack out for the rest of the business market as they all gravitate towards an ‘all-in-one’ productivity solution. Workflows, when done well, have the potential to massively increase the quality, consistency, and efficiency of a teams’ output - but most solutions don’t capture the flexibility needed to create an enduring workflow.
🎉 Solution
✨ Supermesh
Supermesh gives you an up-to-date understanding of what roles you and your team have ownership of, and who your stakeholders are for each role.
The Supermesh model consists of three relational databases - one for roles, one for people, and one for teams. The magic lies in how these connect with each other.
🧩 Roles
Roles are the areas of work we each take responsibility for in a team. They can be as granular as looking after one step in a review process, or as high-level as having responsibility for sending your companies emails.
If some are shared, they can be shared. If you go on pat/mat leave, they can be temporarily transferred. If there are tasks that anyone can do, they can revolve around your team. No matter what, there’s clarity about what you’re doing. People sharing the same role can grow their expertise and skills together by growing a knowledge hub in the role page.
🧑🧑🧒🧒 Teams
Teams are exactly what you think teams are - and more. They’re the groups that work together to achieve a goal - this could be a classic marketing team, a cross-functional squad, a temporary task-force - the sky’s the limit.
People can sit in multiple teams, roles can be shared across different teams, you can create ambassadors between teams, and keep a record of meetings and updates.
🧍♂️ People
People are at the heart of what we do - they’re the most vital component of any team, and making sure everyone feels confident in their place in that team is critical. Supermesh lets employees and managers keep track of the responsibilities people have, supporting constructive PD processes. It gives contributors a clear sense of who everyone works with, what they do, and for what teams.
📥 Workflows
With these three core components in place, and a couple of functions like dependencies and templatability added, Supermesh can immediately support powerful workflow development that can drastically improve the efficiency of your teams.
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