Power in Organizations
If not Power Over, what kind of power should shape the world we’re building?
It’s clear that a world built on dominance has run its course. In social justice organizations, we’re striving to practice new worlds based on fundamentally different values—but it’s far from clear how to do so.
On the one hand, we seek a liberated future in which each person is free from domination by those holding greater power. Simply switching who gets to impose their will within current systems, whether in our government or organizational hierarchies, seems in fact to entrench the current systems further. On the other hand, power dynamics are inescapable—and even necessary to make the change we so urgently need.
How do we resolve this apparent paradox?
We need to broaden our one-dimensional, masculine concept of power as Power Over others. There is also power that resides within each individual (Power Within), and there is power we wield when we move together even amidst difference (Power With), among still other dimensions of power.
Power Within: Holding space for true agency
Every person possesses an inner flame of agency and internal sovereignty—a power within. It represents our ability to perceive, think, and act from a place of reflection, internal coherence, and grounding in self. It grows when we find internal harmony and a sense of self-worth. It falters when we default to unexamined societal conditioning or become dysregulated.
While leaders are not responsible for the internal work by others to harmonize their internal systems, they can design management processes that hold caring space for power within. A leader’s task is to give each person’s inner flame of agency room to breathe.
To nurture power within:
Design for presence and grounding: Design your environment thoughtfully. Incorporate somatic exercises, including breathwork and conscious movement, into organizational processes.
Maintain epistemic humility: Recognize the validity of cultural, bodily, and intuitive knowledge. Design for a diversity of learning, processing, and communication styles.
Attend to the emotional layer: Create brave spaces and liberated zones. Support people to process emotions surrounding organizational change, so they can lean more fully into co-creating the future.
Power With: Co-creating alignment amidst difference
When we combine our individual flames in the act of co-creation, we wield a power with one another that is not accessible under command-and-control management. The key is to navigate the tension of divergent perspectives without reverting to top-down mandate when things get tough or time runs short.
To exercise the muscles of power with:
Seek right relationship: Ensure exchange and reciprocity, not extraction. Acknowledge and attend to harm. Engage in conversation, not just communication. Move at the pace of trust.
Engage tension: The path to alignment runs through difference and tension. Don’t automatically relegate tension to the “parking lot.” Instead, turn towards each other and lean into generative conflict.
Use principled decision-making: Power with is not about reaching consensus; it’s about reaching coherence amidst difference. Sometimes, consent-based decision-making will be appropriate. Other times, it will be appropriate for decision-making to be shaped by positional authority. In those cases, design thoughtfully for stakeholders to have appropriate power to shape the outcomes at the stages of sense-making, option-framing, and decision. To avoid paralysis, understand that decisions aren’t about certainty; rather, they’re more like agreement about shared intent, and require stakeholders to stay in relationship with one another as the future unfolds.
Power Over: Wearing the mantle of care
Positional authority gives some people power over others, and this has very often caused harm and oppression, both intentionally and unintentionally.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Power over can also be wielded in service of liberatory change. This is leadership not as directing and controlling, but as wearing the mantle of care on behalf of the whole. It’s about creating the conditions in which the flames of power within and power with can grow.
To reframe power over:
Model values in action: Encourage a culture of care by celebrating progress, offering (and receiving) grace, and initiating repair. Embody a calm, steady presence in collective co-regulation amidst uncertainty and tension. Above all, find rest, restoration, and other support for yourself as you carry this emotional labor.
Hold generative space: Build in the time and the norms for working through principled struggle (see card #6). Design intentionally for play, imagination, and joy.
Resist pressure for certainty and control: Management is a classic site of control-oriented power exercised through quantified targets, strict timelines, and color-coded progress dashboards. Leaders can bring new worlds to life by centering relationality and embracing emergence in their organizations.
Foundations of the New World
If you want to dive deeper into a rich and nuanced theory of power, I recommend subscribing to Pieter de Beer’s Substack. Pieter is laying out a theory of power as an emergent property of human coordination. You might start with these:
What is Power, Really?: Unraveling the Myths, Mechanisms, and Multitudes of Power
The Grip That Shapes the World: Power Over as the Architecture of Domination
Resonant Thresholds: How Power Through, Moves Between and Beyond
These are not quick reads; they’re building out a theory in great depth. But they are visionary, and are helping to lay the foundations for a world built on fundamentally different principles than the world we have today.
We’re all still figuring out how to navigate between the world we’ve known and the world that comes next. What can you share about how we should be orienting toward power as we practice our way to new worlds?
