Research
The future of human organisation. What holds a group of people together once the org chart stops explaining anything — cybernetics, complexity, the commons, and self-determination theory.
Daniel Ospina
I'm a serial entrepreneur with a passion for collaboration systems and organisation design.
“Sameness and scale were advantages in the industrial age. Coherence, agility, and connection are what matters in the age of networks.” Daniel Ospina
Welcome
I'm Daniel Ospina. Through my work I research the future of human organisation, gather and empower communities, envision products, and design social systems and mechanisms.
I'm an instigator at RnDAO, a research-led venture builder and product ecosystem focused on collaboration tech and the future of work. You can read our vision here and about our current ventures here.
Before RnDAO I served as Head of Governance at Aragon, facilitating the design and launch of their DAO, and I have advised and contributed to a handful of Web3 communities. I've been a visiting lecturer at Saïd Business School (Oxford University), turned around a family enterprise by embedding self-management practices, started two companies, run workshops for the likes of Google, BCG and the United Nations — and started as a chef, working my way up through the ranks of Michelin star restaurants.
These experiences have taught me that great ideas can come from anywhere, and that giving them fertile soil starts with building caring relationships and empowering systems.
Focus
Organisation design · decentralised governance · community architecture
Currently
Instigator at RnDAO
Before
Head of Governance at Aragon · Innovation at The Fat Duck Group
Teaching
Visiting lecturer, Saïd Business School, Oxford
Published
Harvard Business Review · Disruption Hub
Worked with
Google · BCG · Daimler · The United Nations
What I do
Facilitation
Organisation design in practice: bringing teams and communities into a room and working through the hard conversations about identity, authority, and change.
Gathering
Building and empowering communities — the rituals and entry points that turn a crowd into a group that can act together.
Systems & mechanisms
Designing the rules: governance systems, social mechanisms, and incentive structures that make decentralised coordination possible instead of merely aspirational.
Selected talks & writing
Harvard Business Review · January 2018
How the best restaurants in the world balance innovation and consistency
A look inside the innovation practice of elite kitchens, and what other organisations can borrow from it.
Disruption Hub · January 2018
Beyond Teams: how to collaborate amidst constant change
Why static teams are failing, and what fluid, community-based collaboration looks like instead.
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TEDx UHasselt
Belgium, 2017The Creative Paradox
Have you ever had a great idea, just to realise moments later that someone had already done it?
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Future X Conference
Ministry of Industry of Portugal, 2017The Future of Organizations
Community, multicentred, and change as a movement.
Recent writing — Tortoise blog
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October 18, 2026
TortoiseAI Is Making Coding Cheap. Software Engineering Is the New Bottleneck.
We're building agents that can write code faster than ever. But writing more code and engineering better systems are fundamentally different problems.
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October 15, 2026
TortoiseThe State of Agentic Memory in 2026: Recall Is Measured. Learning Isn't.
Why recall is the measured part of agent memory and learning is not: the eight memory types, what epistemic memory adds, and how to test whether your agent revises beliefs.
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September 24, 2026
TortoiseAgents don't need more memory. They need a world model.
Agent memory isn't a filing problem — it's a reasoning problem. Agents need to track what's true, why we believe it, and how beliefs change with evidence.
Let's work together.
Workshops, facilitation, speaking, or advisory work on organisation design and decentralised governance. I'd love to hear what you're wrestling with.