Hello friends!
I just moved on from Kuala Lumpur to Chiang Mai, where I’m starting to explore the “pop-up web3 communities“ and meet people who come here. Below is a summary of my observations and learnings from EthKL, related to workshops and Deep Work’s presence at IRL events.
I decided to edit this podcast less and focus on trying our best to make sense of what is going on around us, so it might feel even more “unfiltered“ than previously.
Our conversation points:
[00:02:00] - Observation of self-deception in web3 and fear of making decisions
[00:05:30] - How these behaviors relate to the disintegration of legacy social systems
[00:18:40] - Current and historical events of information asymmetry among a population
[00:32:00] - Lack of qualitative measurement of impact in web3
[00:41:00] - Colin’s prediction of how the socioeconomic pressures might unfold over the next 2 years
[00:46:00] - Deep Work’s new website, user testing insights, and how other agencies don’t make their value/pricing clear
[01:08:00] - Reviewing the rest of the newsletter content
Enjoy the read/listen and have a nice day!
Recent internal updates
I have interviewed a series of founders and past clients for feedback on the new website. After about 5 interviews the structure and content of the website significantly changed (before and after). We will now slowly start refining the visual design and creating more product pages. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback!
A few interviews also revealed that we seem to be unique in the ability to sell lower-cost services at a predictable price and high frequency while retaining our quality standard at scale. This will be very useful for us in the current economic environment, where customers are increasingly reluctant to commit to bigger projects.
Based on my research, most design agencies don’t mention pricing. I have been invited to/scheduled a series of IRL workshops. I put them all in the Awareness team in Deep Teams. Feel free to suggest contributions, more details on what I’m planning are below.
By the way, if you’re registering to “Join the organization” in Deep Teams, it will only mean that you will show up in a list of people who a project manager can select. I regularly review the join requests and approve anyone who I’ve had a conversation with.
Insights from EthKL
EthKL was a nice and social event, thanks to Vienna who organized it. It was mainly a hackathon with talks in between, but also an opportunity to meet interesting people and repeat the facilitation of my workshop.
One of the workshops, facilitated by Jules, aimed at reflecting on the past, mapping out the future, and considering necessary steps towards that future. Structurally, it reminded me of Jordan Peterson’s self-authoring suite for individuals, which has a positive effect on intrinsic motivation. I really enjoyed seeing it being applied to teams. It was excellently facilitated and well attended.
I also had a delightful conversation with the co-host and tech lead Yufei from GCC. GCC is a global Chinese web3 community, with roots in the open-source movement. Yufei shared with me that recently he observed an increase in non-technical people joining the community with the same ethos. However, they still face challenges around low-cost coordination and non-developer tooling.
General observations from the conference
Many other conversations, especially with founders, reveal an emerging awareness of challenging market conditions. Many founders sound confident but eventually open up to the fact that this market presents unique challenges related to team cohesion and finding real-world applications for their tech.
As a designer, it also reminded me how easy it is to get attention when your skill is rare. This was one of the strategies when we started Deep Work and still makes it easy to be avoid playing the competition game.
New structure for IRL workshops
The workshop I tried to facilitate at EthKL brought a series of challenges. It was a new environment with conditions that made the current structure break almost entirely.
Things that didn’t work
I wasn’t prepared to facilitate on-stage in a distracting environment
There were multiple groups (previously I facilitated only one)
Participants came and left
We used tables instead of a wall space
The title was very general and focused on the process
You can read my full review here, but the experience made me reconsider how I should structure the workshop to ensure participants leave with a unique experience. I will keep working on it over the next weeks, but the idea is to combine what worked well in presentations with what worked well in workshops into one interactive experience.
To address the issues above
There might be more ideas, feel free to share more with me.
It should work on-stage, with groups being able to follow the process. May require individual facilitators for each group.
The title should be more focused on a specific challenge or topic, rather than teaching abstract methods.
I need to have slides that show each step of the process.
The experience should be designed to attract and maintain participants’ attention throughout the whole session. This will require a 30-60 minute speaker slot.
Goals for the next sessions
Create awareness around Deep Work and our methods by experiencing them.
Exploring solutions to complex, interesting, and creative social challenges.
Drive intrinsic motivation in participants to form teams and get excited about working together.
Facilitate the emergence of long-term projects.
Sessions you can join
Here’s a list of events during which I will be facilitating sessions over the next month:
Seapunk - Expanding pro-social norms outside of web3 bubbles (more details TBD)
Funding The Commons - Challenges TBD, but we want to know how a 48-hour format for a design jam can work and refine the process.
DAO Asia Summit - Exploring contemporary challenges and opportunities for DAOs in Asia.
Parallel Societies Congress - How might we encourage local communities to collaborate and transform from within cities?
Devcon - 4-day program with workshops, schedule TBD.
As mentioned above, you can find more details, working files, and suggest contributions in the Awareness team in Deep Teams.
Other things worth mentioning
I recently met Laura, who completed a master's degree in Design for Emergent Futures at Fab Lab Barcelona. They follow an open-source philosophy for organizational design and use Git to coordinate their work. If you are in Barcelona, I highly recommend checking out the Distributed Design Society.
Several weeks ago I designed an app and shared the design in this newsletter. Some of you were interested in my design approach, so I recorded a short video to summarise it.
I noticed that I have failed to follow up with a few short-term promises recently. I’m doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again, apologize if I forget something, please ping me if I do.
I also had a few conversations with friends about how we can make better sense of what we are doing in life. It won’t fit into this newsletter, but I might write about it in the future, and am curious about your experience:
Recommended content
Notes from a Fellow Traveler - Derren Brown
Derren Brown has influenced a big part of my personal development since I was 15 or so. Understanding human psychology through magic tricks and performance, stoic philosophy, and the motivation to create magical experiences with high standards for art taught me most of what I apply nowadays in design. In this recent book, he describes his learnings from touring with a magic show, how to structure a unique show and his approach to deeply connecting with the audience. The book is very well written and explains a lot of what makes his acts unique. He managed to create his own genre of art, which is why I think it deserves a mention in this newsletter.
Inflation relative to gold in the Weimar Republic
Nowadays gold is less popular than Bitcoin, but it’s an interesting reference, considering recent excessive money printing in the US, China, Germany, and other “first world“ countries that forcefully try to stabilize their fiat currency. The high volatility is very interesting.
That’s it for today, have a nice rest of the month, and see you in two weeks!
Andrej
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