There are around 85% of men in web3 today. If we can match the level of cognitive complexity with a similar level of emotional maturity, we could help unlock the potential for life-serving and regenerative technologies at scale.

In this community story, researcher Timothée Bres dives into the work of Androgynous Leadership and introduces the ReFi GYM, an online school for leadership and men's work to learn how to combine effective collaboration with clear direction. This is an introductory article to a deeper work you can explore here.

Reinventing masculinity for the future of leadership

ReFi GYM is proud to collaborate on this course with ReFi DAO and support them as the first web3 organisation taking the "androgynous path" consciously.

In this era of poly-crisis and exponential technology, young male leaders and DAO founders tend to struggle with assuming leadership explicitly and in a healthy way. They face hurdles in establishing clear and empowering boundaries while providing unambiguous direction.

This gap frequently results in unwritten rules, shadowy power structures, and a toxic environment where avoiding conflict and playing power games become the norm. On the other side, these leaders may find it challenging to listen, delegate and truly trust and connect with their teams, stifling the group's collective intelligence, innovative capabilities, and creative energy.

ReFi GYM is supporting male founders and leaders in the development of emotional agility and the mastery of yin/yang dynamics at individual and collective levels. Reconciling power and vulnerability to develop high-trust cultures, teams and DAOs that can be both impactful AND values aligned at scale.

“We have all seen how often DAOs can go wrong. GYM provides a powerful pathway to cultivate healthy masculinity and learn the powers of androgynous leadership. This is a much-needed course for Web3 founders and leaders.” Monty Bryant - Co-Founder ReFi DAO

Join a select group of 20 ReFi and web3 leaders over 6 weeks to unlock the power and wisdom of DAOs through mens work, androgynous leadership and archetypes.

Introducing Androgynous Leadership ☯

Learning how to switch between leadership (yang) and followership (yin), and between the different leadership roles in the right way, at the right time is an art. This model works for both males & females.

• Cosmic Lover: master of emotional intelligence, nurturing, care and team cohesion in service of collaboration. Listens actively and with compassion, the lover transforms sadness into motivation and conflicts into growth.
• Cyber Shaman: connected to the invisible between digital innovation and ancient wisdom, intuitive pioneers guiding the tribe through complexity. Transforms fear into a catalyst for radical innovation.
• Warrior of Gaia: manifests the vision through decisive actions, mastery, courage, discipline, assertiveness resilience and a commitment to excellence. Gets shit done. Protects what is sacred. Transform anger into focused action.
• King of Consciousness: grounded, stable, present with strong foundations. Clear direction and boundaries, fostering a culture of trust. Cultivates joy and hope through stability and order, ensuring that people feel secure, valued, and motivated to contribute to the shared vision.

Androgynous Leadership is the key for DAOs to scale their impact while maintaining values alignment. And the key of androgynous organisations: teams that combine radical innovation, a clear structure (direction, boundaries, responsibilities) with an impact at scale and a collaborative culture of care.

6-week online course

Every week, Dominik and I will hold a 1h30 collective inquiry and practice space, bringing insights, wisdom, tools, embodied practices and various psycho-technologies we’ve been gathering over the last 10 years across many centralised and decentralised contexts.

With the ReFi GYM course, learn how to

• Develop high-trust and high-performance cultures
• Ground yourself to increase presence and clarity
• Balance directive and collaborative leadership
• Scale your impact while increasing psychological safety
• Develop your emotional agility and androgynous capacities
• Create complementary and high-performance teams
• Transform the most common pitfalls of DAOs into growth
• Create your personal inner compass and values alignment tracker
• Apply these principles at team/collective level

For deeper explorations, every participant will have the option to join a practice pod with 5 other men (temporary men circle for 1h a week). Come by yourself or join as a pod, with your team for an even deeper experience at a special rate.

The Androgynous Organisation aka T.A.O. ♡🚀

Androgynous Leadership, comes from T.A.O., a research/action project to address the blindspots and limitations of decentralised organisational models.

• Hierarchy: From domination hierarchy, where power is clear but oppressive, to shadow hierarchy, where power is invisible and potentially manipulative.
• Communication: From aggressive communication and direct confrontation to passive-aggressiveness and conflict avoidance.
• Boundaries: From explicit and rigid to flexible but ambiguous boundaries leading to collaboration chaos, role confusion and lack of individual accountability.
• Decision Making: From autocratic decision-making that may be efficient but authoritarian, to participative decision making, where too many voices can slow down or prevent action through decision paralysis.
• Competition: From the shadows of competition, where predatory practices lead to burn out and negative externalities, to the shadows of collaboration, where groupthink may prevail and competition becomes implicit.

Take the best, leave the rest

How to take the best of both centralised and decentralised models ?

To unlock impact AND values alignment at scale, androgynous leaders and organisations need to develop the capacity to tap into both polarities in function of the context.

For example :

• Androgynous hierarchy: combining natural, experience and competence based hierarchy with a decentralised structure and participative processes.
• Coopetition : combining healthy competition (explicit, respectful, playful) with deep and embodied collaborative practices.
• Androgynous Boundaries : clear and explicit but also flexible and empowering boundaries.
• Group Coherence : the collective capacity to hold intensity and the key to sync individual needs with collective alignment.
• Assertiveness: explicit, clear and compassionate communication (beyond dominant confrontation or passive aggressiveness).
• Emotional agility : capacity to express both sadness and anger in a healthy way.

Special thanks to Monty for the support and co-editing of this article.

The ReFi GYM is part of The Blindspot Project, an agency hosting the T.A.O. research/action project and proposing workshops, courses and immersive experiences, learn more.