Research in Progress in Organization Design for Collective Governance and Innovation

Webinar

Research in Progress in Organization Design for Collective Governance and Innovation

 26th September 2024, Thursday at 11am EST/5pm CET 

In this ODC "Research in Progress" (RiP) webinar, organized and moderated by Ying-Ying Hsieh (Imperial College Business School), two PhD students - Matteo Devigili (Bayes/INSEAD) and Xule Lin (Imperial College Business School) - working on research at the intersection of decentralized organization designs that facilitate collective governance and innovation. They will present their working papers on “Coordination by Plan and Feedback: Complementarity and Substitution” and “Tokens' Dual Role in DAOs: Enabling Collective Governance and Shaping Outcomes “ (each about 20 mins). The presentations will be followed by a commentary by Phanish Puranam (INSEAD). The webinar will end with feedback/comments from the audience. Please see below for the abstracts of the papers and the bios of the participants.

Ying-Ying Hsieh [Organizer and Moderator]

Ying-Ying Hsieh is an Assistant Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School. Her research focuses on decentralized organization designs powered by digital technologies like blockchain. Specifically, she focuses on the coordination, governance, and innovation processes within decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that are self-organized without central authorities. Her work has been published in the Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of Organization Design. Ying-Ying is a Future of Organizations Fellow awarded by the Organization Design Community.

Matteo Devigili [Presenter]

Presentation Title: Coordination by Plan and Feedback: Complementarity and Substitution

Abstract:

When it comes to coordinating activities across interdependent units, organizations can rely on two broad classes of mechanisms. Coordination by Plan (CbP) requires the creation of schedules to govern the actions of interdependent units, and Coordination by Feedback (CbF) involves transmitting new information during the action process. While the managerial literature agrees on these fundamental mechanisms, less consent exists on which mechanism is preferred, under which conditions, and why. In other words, we know that these coordination modes co-occur and are foundational to the functioning of organizations. Yet, we do not know under which conditions they act as complements or substitutes and with what consequences for preventing and solving coordination failures.

To unpack the relationship between CbF and CbP and their consequences on coordination, we leverage the context of open-source software (OSS). OSS is a site for knowledge collaboration and innovation characterized by open boundaries, fluid membership, self-selection over tasks, and the absence of co-location. These characteristics make OSS highly dynamic, with a high elastic labor supply. Here, a fundamental manifestation of coordination failure is the problem of crowding (i.e., an anomalous state under which some activities remain unallocated while others become overstaffed). Hence, this research aims to unpack how CbP and CbF act as complements or substitutes in solving coordination failures in OSS.

We leverage twenty years of email exchanges between Linux Kernel developers to answer our research question. We specifically focused on two key points regarding plan implementation. First, we examined CbP-CbF complementarity, analyzing the changes in CbF after the introduction of a plan for coordinating developers' activities in August 2005. Second, we study CbP-CbF substitution, analyzing the use of CbF when the established plan fails -- i.e., unexpected schedule variations. At the current stage, the analysis provides preliminary evidence of the effect of the two coordination modes in responding to the crowding problem.

Short Bio: Matteo Devigili is a fourth-year PhD student at Bayes (formerly Cass) Business School, soon transitioning to a Post-doctoral Researcher role at INSEAD. My research centers on the organizing and functioning of online communities, with a particular focus on open-source software. In this setting, I explore how individuals interact and collaborate without formal authority, and how these dynamics influence coordination, control, valuation, and the emergence of novelty.

Xule Lin [Presenter]

Presentation Title: Tokens' Dual Role in DAOs: Enabling Collective Governance and Shaping Outcomes

Abstract: 

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent a radical shift in organizational governance, with decision-making and value creation distributed across stakeholders through token-based mechanisms. However, the implications of this token-centric design for effective governance remain unclear. We conduct an exploratory, multiple-case study of three prominent DAOs in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. Integrating grounded theory, neural topic modeling (NTM), and large language models (LLMs), we conduct interviews and inductively analyze extensive DAO data. Based on iterative synthesis of human and machine learning insights, our preliminary analysis reveals a fundamental duality wherein tokens serve as both a governance tool and outcome. However, this duality has not been previously studied and can lead to tensions between distributed authority and efficiency needs, as well as between collective value distribution and goal alignment across diverse stakeholders. We find that tensions associated with the duality of tokens may inadvertently undermine the decentralizing promise of token-based governance and result in two layers of hierarchical structures. Our study elucidates this overlooked duality and its governance implications, highlighting core tensions and centralization risks that must be addressed in DAO governance. We outline opportunities for governance mechanisms balancing decentralization and coordination.

Short Bio: Xule Lin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London. His research focuses on the intersection of new forms of organizing and decentralized governance, with a focus on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). He investigates how social and algorithmic mechanisms enable these digital communities to develop and adapt their governance structures. Methodologically, Lin combines grounded theory with innovative AI-based analysis techniques, including neural topic modeling and large language models. His work contributes to advancing theory on organizational design in the digital age, particularly in the context of decentralized and algorithmically mediated environments. Lin's research has been recognized through grants from OpenAI, Google Cloud, and Cohere for AI, and he has been nominated for Strategic Management Society conference awards.

Phanish Puranam [Discussant]

Phanish Puranam is a Professor of Strategy, the Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Strategy and Organisation Design at INSEAD.

Phanish’s research in organization science focuses on how organizations work, and how we can make them work better. His current work focuses on different ways in which intelligent algorithms relate to organizations, in their roles as tools (e.g., machine learning applied to organizational data), team-mates (e.g., human-AI collaboration), and as templates for organizing (blockchain, metaverse).

Besides publishing his research extensively in peer reviewed journals (see link to Personal Website above), Phanish has also written several books. The Microstructure of Organizations (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers researchers a new perspective on organization design. Phanish’s books for practitioners include Corporate Strategy: Tools for analysis and decisions (co-authored with Bart Vanneste, Cambridge University Press, 2016) which is used as a reference in MBA programs around the world. India Inside (co-authored with Nirmalya Kumar, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) won critical acclaim for its balanced look at the prospect of India emerging as a global hub for innovation. Recently, he also released Ver1.0 of the free The Organizational Analytics E-Book: A guide to data driven organization design (with Julien Clement). He is currently working on two new books. “Rethinking Organizations” (Penguin Random House Publishers) explores what organizations of the future might look like, in the light of rapid changes in technology and culture, and “Hierarchy in Organizations” reviews what we have learned about the emergence, growth, stability and adaptive properties of hierarchies, as well as their limits.

Hope you will be able to join us!