DAO Primitives Group Facilitation Guide

Aug 11, 202514 min read

DAO Primitives Group Facilitation Guide

Purpose of this Guide

This guide helps facilitators navigate and use the DAO Primitives Framework to support a group to develop a decentralized governance and operational structure. It follows steps to assess group context, design appropriate governance and operational structures, and then implement and operationalize these systems. It serves as a roadmap to navigate through the existing DAO Primitives framework resources, showing facilitators how to sequence and apply the tools developed here.

I. Introduction: Facilitating Using the DAO Primitives

This guide draws from the DAO Primitives Framework and utilizes many of the documents and tools in the framework. It works through 3 basic steps in the facilitation flow: Discover, Design & Implement:

  1. Discover - Learn about the group and understand the starting context - produce a discovery report/proposal
  2. Design - Governance and operational structure using organizational primitives and patterns - produce a governance design/proposal
  3. Implement - The design using the structured processes from implementation guides

This process will vary in its depth and rigor based on the scale and phase of the group that is being facilitated.

For example, setting up a single cell within an existing operational structure could be a relatively fast process because you are dealing with a small collaboration scale team making mostly internal decisions about how it will structure and govern itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, if you’re dealing with a large group looking to establish a DAO, this group facilitation process will be much more involved. The larger group of stakeholders needing to be engaged across multiple different scales will be more complex and time-consuming, and the resulting governance and operational structure will likewise be more complex.

The facilitation process follows these key steps:

  1. Assessing Context: Understanding the group’s current phase, scale, and state
  2. Identifying Needs: Determining the most pressing challenges and opportunities
  3. Selecting Patterns: Choosing appropriate organizational patterns from the Pattern Library
  4. Implementing Solutions: Adapting and applying these patterns to the specific context
  5. Evolving & Iterating: Continuously refining the approach based on feedback

II. Discovery

Group Sense Making: The Foundation of Discovery

The discovery process begins with a fundamental recognition: most groups, whether they’re nascent DAOs, established teams, or emerging networks, operate with surprisingly little shared understanding of their own context. While groups often form around compelling high-level ideas or shared visions, the actual alignment around concrete intentions, operational realities, and stakeholder needs frequently remains unexplored territory.

Group sense making serves as the cornerstone of effective governance design because it transforms individual perspectives into collective intelligence. This process is particularly crucial for decentralized organizations where traditional hierarchical structures cannot rely on top-down clarity to resolve ambiguity. Instead, the group itself must become the primary mechanism for developing shared understanding and surfacing areas of misalignment that could undermine future governance structures.

The sense making process serves two interconnected purposes:

  • Collective Discovery: Enables the group to discover its own context collaboratively, which is essential because governance systems built on assumed consensus often fail to meet stakeholder needs
  • Ongoing Coherence: Provides an artifact that group members can use to build on the group’s organizational development, such as evolving the governance structure and developing their impact model

For larger groups and those encompassing multiple stakeholder contexts, the sense making process becomes even more involved. These environments contain diverse perspectives, competing incentives, and varying definitions of success that must be surfaced and integrated before effective governance can be designed.

Mapping Organizational Context and Stakeholder Landscapes

The heart of group sense making involves systematically mapping the current organizational context, beginning with stakeholder perspectives on vision, purpose, and impact goals. This mapping process reveals not just what stakeholders want the group to achieve, but how they understand the group’s role within larger systems and what success looks like from their vantage point.

Process Steps by Group Scale:

For Single Teams/Small Groups:

  1. Conduct intensive workshop sessions with structured dialogue
  2. Surface individual mental models and assumptions
  3. Identify areas of alignment and divergence collaboratively
  4. Document shared understanding and remaining tensions

For Community Networks/Multi-Stakeholder Groups:

  1. Gather insights from different stakeholder groups separately
  2. Synthesize and share insights back to the wider community
  3. Iterate through multiple rounds of sense making
  4. Continue until authentic shared understanding emerges (not just superficial agreement)

The sense making process often reveals early patterns that become crucial for design:

  • Stakeholder Relationships: Who needs to coordinate with whom and how
  • Value Flows: How value creation and exchange naturally occurs within the network
  • Power Dynamics: Where influence and decision-making authority currently reside
  • Resource Dependencies: What the group needs to function and where those resources come from

Understanding these emergent patterns provides crucial input for the design phase, as governance structures must align with and support the natural dynamics of the network rather than imposing artificial constraints.

Throughout this process, facilitators can draw upon various sense making tools and methodologies available in the sense-making-facilitation-tools for specific facilitation needs.

Producing Discovery Outputs: Reports and Proposals

The discovery phase culminates in concrete outputs that capture insights and provide clear direction for next steps. These outputs serve as both culmination and foundation—capturing the collective intelligence generated through sense making while establishing the legitimacy and direction needed for governance design.

1. Discovery Report

The discovery report comprehensively documents the sense making process and should include:

  • Shared Understanding: Clear articulation of agreed-upon purpose and high-level goals
  • Divergent Perspectives: Honest acknowledgment of areas where different viewpoints persist
  • Stakeholder Mapping: Overview of key participants, their interests, and relationship patterns
  • Value Flow Insights: Early understanding of how value creation and exchange occurs
  • Areas for Further Exploration: Recognition of questions that require continued attention

This report functions as more than documentation—it becomes a foundational artifact that establishes legitimacy for the governance design process and provides accountability for how stakeholder input shaped the emerging direction.

2. Proposal

The nature of the proposal depends significantly on the group’s scale and autonomy:

Small Teams with Internal Autonomy:

Larger Groups Requiring External Authorization:

  • Communication of discovery insights to broader stakeholders
  • Compelling case for moving to design phase
  • Resource requirements and anticipated outcomes
  • Designation of design team with clear accountability mechanisms

When working with larger, more complex groups, the proposal often involves designating a smaller design team that will work in consultation with the broader community. This approach balances the need for focused design work with ongoing stakeholder engagement, but requires clear agreements about how the design team will maintain connection with and accountability to the wider group throughout the design process.

III. Design

Design Governance & Operational Structures

The design phase translates the insights and shared understanding from discovery into concrete governance and operational structures. This process moves from broad stakeholder alignment to specific organizational architecture, requiring careful attention to both the technical requirements of governance systems and the human dynamics that will animate them.

1. Define Purpose and High-Level Goals

If they have not already been defined and agreed upon in the discovery step

Activity: Purpose Statement Development

  • Gather key stakeholders to define essential purpose
  • Identify values that governance must uphold
  • Document high-level goals for governance structure
  • Create impact model if needed

2. Defining the Requirements of the Governance System

Activity: Requirements Mapping

Based on the discovery report, the design team needs to define the overarching parameters of the governance and operational system. These requirements emerge from the articulated purpose and high-level goals, as well as the needs and desires of different stakeholders, the activities they want to engage in, and the constraints they operate within.

This requirements mapping process serves as a bridge between the broad insights from discovery and the specific design choices that follow. Without clear requirements, design teams often default to familiar patterns that may not serve the group’s actual needs, or they become paralyzed by the overwhelming array of governance options available.

Governance Requirements

The governance system must be designed to handle the specific decision-making needs and stakeholder dynamics that emerged during discovery:

  • Decision Scope: What types of decisions need formal governance processes versus informal coordination
  • Stakeholder Inclusion: Who needs representation in governance and at what level of engagement
  • Scale Considerations: What different group scales need to be included and how they interface
  • Time Horizons: What timeframes governance must address (immediate operations vs. long-term strategy)
  • Resource Management: What resources governance will oversee and how allocation decisions get made
  • Technical Constraints: What factors shape implementation possibilities (existing systems, technical capacity, budget limitations)

Operational Requirements

The operational structure must support the group’s ability to execute on its purpose while maintaining the autonomy and coordination patterns that stakeholders value:

  • Core Activities: How the group will operationalize its purpose to achieve stated goals
  • Autonomy Levels: The degree of decentralization of authority and responsibilities needed for operations to succeed
  • Information Systems: How information needs to flow through the operational structure for effective coordination

For small teams with a clear mandate, this requirements mapping can often be completed in focused working sessions. However, for more complex groups involving multiple stakeholder types or scales, this process may require additional engagement and insights gathering from across the network to ensure all perspectives are captured and integrated.

3. Design the Governance & Operational Model

1. Choose a Governance Approach

Based on the articulated purpose and mapped requirements, the design team must narrow in on a particular governance approach from the many available options for decentralized governance. The community-governance pattern outlines several approaches worth considering, but the choice will depend on multiple factors including the specific needs of the group, the nature of their work, and the structure and culture of existing networks they coordinate with.

The discovery phase should have surfaced key insights into what qualities the group wants from its governance approach—whether they prioritize maximally decentralized decision-making, trust and capture resistance, technical sophistication, or other values. These insights become crucial selection criteria when evaluating governance options.

Review the dao-primitives framework along with index and index to guide the group toward settling on a governance approach that matches their outlined requirements rather than defaulting to popular or familiar options that may not fit their context.

2. Entities and Agreements

The DAO Primitives Framework provides four basic organizational primitives that offer a flexible system for governance design. These building blocks are designed so governance and operational patterns can be applied to them to compose bespoke yet coherent governance structures that deliver the governance qualities a group desires.

Core Primitives

Using the index as building blocks:

  • DAOs: Entity structure for purpose-aligned networks
  • Cells: Entity structure for small autonomous teams
  • Roles: Agreement primitive for ongoing responsibilities and permissions
  • Tasks: Agreement primitive for specific work deliverables

The design process involves determining which combination of these primitives will best serve the group’s requirements, then identifying specific patterns for how to compose them into functional structures. Examples of using these primitives to compose governance and operational models can be found in index, including case studies like rpp-governance-case-study.

3. Pattern Selection

Based on the chosen governance approach, the design team builds out a complete governance and operational model by selecting patterns and primitives best suited to delivering the desired functionality. This selection process requires balancing multiple considerations: the group’s current capacity, their growth projections, the complexity they can manage, and the specific coordination challenges they face.

Governance and operational patterns can be found in index. Facilitators should help the group select patterns that work effectively in conjunction with the chosen primitives (DAOs, Cells, Roles & Tasks) to create a governance and operational system that functions as intended rather than creating elegant structures that fail in practice.

4. Feedback and Approval

Meaningful participation from all group stakeholders in deciding on governance and operational design is essential for both quality outcomes and system legitimacy. For large, complex groups, this participation must be orchestrated across multiple scales to balance broad input with design coherence:

  1. Collaboration Scale: The team tasked with governance design needs internal processes for evaluating ideas and making design decisions
  2. Coordination Scale: Larger groups of highly engaged individuals can participate through feedback processes, workshops, and other coordination mechanisms
  3. Constituency Scale: Wider communities of stakeholders can engage through preference signaling and voting mechanisms

Managing engagement across different scales ensures the design process benefits from broad community intelligence while preventing the tyranny of structurelessness from derailing effective decision-making. The goal is to harness collective wisdom without allowing the design process to devolve into protracted politics.

5. Design Proposal

The design phase should conclude with a clear proposal that confirms the governance and operational model. For small groups, this might take the form of an internal decision recorded in the group’s state document. For larger, more complex groups, this typically requires a formal community proposal process.

It’s crucial that any proposal clearly describes the governance design in sufficient detail that stakeholders understand exactly what they’re approving. Vague or overly abstract proposals often lead to implementation conflicts when different participants discover they had different interpretations of what was agreed upon.

IV. Implementation

1. Design Implementation Steps

The final component of the design phase involves creating a clear roadmap for implementing the governance system. This implementation plan must account for the dynamic nature of group development and the reality that complex governance systems evolve rather than launching fully formed.

Group-Phase Considerations

Follow the index model to ensure implementation steps are appropriate for each phase of the group’s evolution:

  • Conversation Phase: Informal gathering of ideas and intentions
  • Formation Phase: Basic agreements and initial structures
  • Organization Phase: Formalized systems and processes
  • Coordination Phase: Ongoing operations and evolution
  • Completion Phase: Winding down unneeded groups

For larger, more complex groups, different parts of the governance and operational structure may exist at different phases simultaneously as the system evolves. Single groups typically exist within one phase at a time, allowing for more straightforward implementation sequencing.

Group-Scale Integration

Similarly, follow the group-scale model to ensure the implementation plan addresses governance entities, agreements, tools, and practices appropriate to current and projected group scales. Complex groups will have multiple scales represented across their governance structure, with smaller scale groups nested within larger structures. The implementation plan must account for scale evolution as groups grow and change over time.

Group-State Anchoring

Anchor the development of the governance system to the evolution of group-state documentation for each entity in the system. For DAO development, begin with sketching a high-level version of the DAO state appropriate to the formation phase. This can provide essential infrastructure like proposal processes and treasury management that enable community stakeholders to provide mandates for ongoing governance development and resource allocation.

For single teams, implementing governance can proceed much more rapidly. If requirements are clear, a completed group-state can be produced quickly, allowing teams to move from formation through organization to coordination phase in short timeframes.

Implementation Guides

Several implementation guides provide documented processes for specific governance systems. If the chosen governance approach and pattern set maps to available guides, they can be followed for detailed implementation guidance:

  • Community Governance: For constituency-scale governance
  • Operational Governance: For coordination-scale operations
  • Multi-Stakeholder Governance: For inter-network partnerships

2. Implementation Plan Development

Produce a comprehensive plan for implementing the governance and operational system, including:

  • Implementation Phases: Sequenced stages of system development
  • Timelines: Realistic schedules for each phase and milestone
  • Budget Requirements: Resource needs for implementation activities
  • Implementation Team: Who will execute the work and their responsibilities

3. Implementation Proposal

The implementation plan itself requires approval through appropriate governance mechanisms. For small groups with dedicated resources, this can be an internal decision reflected in group state documentation. For larger groups with community membership, this should follow established or new community proposal processes to ensure proper authorization and resource allocation.

V. Resources for Ongoing Support

A. Framework Documentation

B. Specific Implementation Support

  • Detailed implementation index for each governance type
  • Pattern Library for specific solutions - index
  • Templates and tools within the implementation guides
    • Facilitation support through SuperBenefit network

C. Community Resources

  • SuperBenefit Knowledge Garden for broader context as well as specific Patterns, Guides and Tools

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