The Shared Principles
Universal across doáb. Translated by every member, in every place.
One set of principles, many translations
The values are held in common. The translation is the work.
Everything doáb constitutes — the cooperative, its member enterprises, the ventures of the studio, its delivery teams, and its programs of learning — is guided by one shared set of principles.
doáb also works within many partnerships: universities, governments, health systems. There, its role is to orchestrate, never to govern. Each partner remains fully itself. These principles bind only how doáb shows up: as a coherent, trustworthy, and respectful collaborator.
How the principles are translated into a particular team, culture, and country is the work of the members themselves. No one hands a member a finished culture, and no member is left to invent one alone. Each translates the shared principles into its own reality, and what it learns strengthens all the others.
We fundamentally believe that the future of humanity depends on our capacity to undertake great collective endeavors.
The principles below are how that belief becomes a way of working.
The principles
Nine principles guide every organization in the ecosystem.
01
The capacity of every person
Every human being has the capacity to contribute to the betterment of their community. Work is organized so that it develops people, not merely uses them.
02
Protagonists, not recipients
People and communities are the protagonists of their own development. No one develops anyone else; conditions are created in which capacity can grow from within.
03
Learning as our mode of operation
Action, reflection, consultation, and study move in continuous cycles. Plans are held humbly; experience is documented honestly, including what does not work.
04
Coherence between values and operations
What an organization professes and how it hires, decides, compensates, and operates must be one thing. Coherence is examined continually, not assumed.
05
Individual and collective transformation together
The growth of persons and the progress of institutions are one movement. Neither is pursued at the expense of the other.
06
Enterprise in service of the common good
Ventures exist to create real value in coherence with a community’s purpose. Viability is honored; extraction is not.
07
Unity in diversity
Unity is not sameness. Difference of background, experience, and thought is welcomed as the way truth is found. A team becomes one by seeing more together, not by thinking alike.
08
Justice in economic arrangement
Splits are published, surplus is shared, governance rests on one member, one voice, and access is opened for those who would otherwise be excluded.
09
Knowledge as a common enterprise
Access to knowledge, and participation in its generation, application, and sharing, belongs to everyone. Pathways to deeper learning remain open to all.
The commitment
Time and space for meaningful conversation.
These questions are not answered in passing. Every cohort makes deliberate time for studying together, reflecting on experience, and consulting on what the principles ask of them here.
This is a commitment, not a preference. Making this time is a binding element of membership: a practice every member enterprise undertakes and stays true to.
The quality of these reflections is measured by the purposeful action that emerges from them. Conversation that does not give rise to action has not yet completed itself; action that is not examined teaches little.
The practice of translation
Questions every team returns to, continually.
Translation is not a document; it is a discipline. Guided by doáb, every organization returns to questions like these:
How are we hiring?
Whom are our doors open to, whom are we developing, and does the way we bring people in build capacity or merely acquire it?
Is our culture coherent with our values?
Do our daily operations, the way we treat one another, and the way decisions are made express what we profess?
Do our economics express justice?
Compensation, pricing, ownership, and the treatment of surplus: do they match the principles we claim?
How are we learning?
Are we acting, reflecting, and consulting in real cycles, and contributing what we learn back to the commons?
Are our people growing as the enterprise grows?
Does each person’s capability, judgment, and scope of service expand through the work itself?
The principles are held in common. The translation is local. The growth of the individual and the growth of the collective advance together.
Communities have built this way for two centuries