Having already set up a draft in the zettelkasten for [[DRAFT Theoretical and Applied Governance]], it might help the drafting effort to explore some of the underlying ideas using the "log" as a pre-publication (for ideonomic provenance) and as a sensemaking exercise.
It seems, across my limited experience in the application of governance models to collective enterprise, that there is a tacit conflation between two sets of efforts, namely the efforts of theoretical governance and applied governance. Where the former is more exploratory and innovative in nature, the latter would be more about adhering to what works. As such, the two form a sort of progressive-conservative dyad, with each side taking feedback from the other.
This distinction, if well conceived and properly socialized, would ideally serve to better organize the intellectual and operational efforts in the areas of governance and organization design. Such as it is right now, there is a very rapid circuit of innovative governance models and practices being implemented, usually to little avail, even if they are illuminating along the way.
I don't mean to over-emphasize the degree to which experimental governance models are prematurely implemented, i.e. implemented without due concern for precedent or applicability. That said, I do think a great deal of theoretical work is undertaken within scenarios of applied governance, or at least undertaken and presented as if it were ready for implementation. I suspect this conflation of theoretical and applied governance may have the effect of expediting the feedback and iteration upon governance models, but also of creative governance environments which are overly complex and/or inaccessible to participants with limited bandwidth for governance participation.
This suspicion leads me to wonder whether theoretical and applied governance indeed have separate sets of constraints and priorities. For example, perhaps theoretical governance is better understood as a chiefly intellectual effort, concerned with advancing the state of the art of governance, learning from the examples set by applied governance. Applied governance, on the other hand, might be best understood as a chiefly practical effort, tightly constrained by some particular operational circumstances, drawing from theoretical governance models in light of these particular circumstances.
In other words, if we clearly delineate a space where governance design efforts are not constrained by particular operational circumstances, but can instead move at the speed of imagination, it may result in less collateral damage (e.g. the creation of overly complex governance arrangements) than if these theoretical efforts were carried out in more operational contexts.
In a certain respect, it is interesting that arguably the greatest virtue of the blockchain governance space, namely its robust proliferation of novel governance techniques, may also be contributing to one of its core problems, namely the governance participation problem. The epistemic paradigm hinted at in this log, characterized by a disambiguation and dynamic compartmentalization of theoretical and applied governance efforts, may potentially help address this problem, by shifting the onus of implementing governance models to the more tactically conservative and precedent-based practitioners (i.e. practitioners who tend to stick with what works and are more conservative about trying new things), while shifting the onus of innovation to those more inclined to explore and advance the models themselves. In other words, by clearly separating the roles of governance practitioner and governance theorist according to their distinct constraints and specialities, it may serve to optimize the advancement of governance itself while also simplifying the actual governance processes implemented by organizations and communities.
Perhaps an example may help illustrate the attitude shift described above. A community forms around an idea, and decides to operationalize it into a project. They know the project will entail collective decision-making, thus necessitating some system of governance, however formal. They decide to use cutting-edge technology, say smart contracts, to execute these governance processes. Already, even assuming they are using the most basic voting methods, they are implementing novel and largely experimental technological infrastructure in an operationalized governance setting.
In my experience, this willingness to leap to such novelty indicates a collective openness to the potential for innovation, at the cost of conventionality, but without full cognizance of this tradeoff. That is, we often don't seem fully aware that we are prematurely applied governance models that make more sense in theory than they do in practice. Granted, my experience is specific to the DAO space, consisting mostly of technologically literate innovators, but that is also the exact community I aim to address with this discourse on the distinction between theoretical and applied governance. In other words, I suspect this epistemic distinction may help us address and resolve some of the prevailing governance inefficiencies in DAOs and similarly distributed communities.
