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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.