The Power Trap

Business leaders are struggling with an increasingly difficult set of management challenges and feel overwhelmed and under-resourced to solve them. Trying to do the right thing with people in a business context has gotten more complex and dynamic and management practices haven't kept up. Our traditional ways of building and managing organizations were not made for instant decisions, global context, or a distributed workforce, let alone an AI-enabled one.

Manufacturing Mindset

Our traditional, hierarchical approach to organization is often assumed to be the only way, or the best way, for people to work together in a business. That assumption leads us into a trap, where no matter how we try to work around the negative effects of that model we're stuck with a simple equation: productivity = effort x time. Hierarchy is the most common way to organize, but it is not our only choice, and it has many flaws when viewed through a contemporary lens of lifetime customer value, innovation, individual wellbeing, and sustainability. Technology has progressed exponentially since the Industrial Revolution and it's time for organizations to catch up.

Today, hearing someone say it's natural to work in a hierarchy because the survival-of-the-fittest mentality breeds winners is on the level of saying the sun revolves around the Earth. Hierarchy is an option, but it's not a law of being human. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow reinterpret human history using the most recent archaeological evidence. They expose the myth of Stone Age foragers living in infantile simplicity and present evidence of a wide variety of social and commercial structures throughout prehistory. Humans have always had choices in how we organize for work, and have always practiced many forms. It is a defining adaptive trait. Our current way of organizing to create commercial value is ubiquitous, but it represents a singular and relatively small slice of human history dominated by the manufacturing model of doing business.

The trap

Current executives won their positions by being great at the current game: rising above their peers in a win-lose fight for a scarce number of powerful seats. When you sit in the CEO chair, or the top functional role, you have substantial resources at your command and considerable authority to decide how things will run. Most leaders of this type are not interested in developing a new kind of organization that would take away their power, even where there is a rational case that doing so would produce better business outcomes.

Stanford's Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton found that companies don't act on what they know because internal competition and ranking effectively shut down new ideas. Even if a leader could consider a change, they are not likely to hear about it. Instead of discussing new ideas and running experiments, autocratic leaders are surrounded by experts with data and stories to reinforce the current view with compelling and exhaustive discourse. Pfeffer and Sutton call this pattern of intellectual self-reinforcement the Smart-Talk Trap. I'd like to call it the Power Trap, for its underlying cause instead of its annoying behavior. Either way it's tough to get out of it.

You've probably seen it in action. A group of busy, stressed professionals gathered in a room, staring at a dense slide full of numbers, proposing ambitious "might be" scenarios based on sophisticated "probably so" causes. One after another chimes in with a brilliant opinion seeking the upper hand, but few ever ask a question. The bottom line is that this behavior reinforces the person in power with what they most want to hear and lets them choose it. It's the emperor with no clothes brought to the modern boardroom. We can do extensive research and identify better patterns of behavior, but if leaders see them as a threat to their current world order they will defend that order vigorously.

The root of power

The word power is derived from the ancient word poti, which is also the root of pater. We know pater as a prefix in many words across most modern languages. Those languages descend from a pre-literate society that thrived on the European steppe fifteen thousand years ago. In that context, poti meant strong lord and referred to the person able to defend his brood in a horse-enabled, hunter-gatherer world full of physical threats. That was most likely a cunning, strong male.

We now use power to mean strength, and pater refers to fathers and parents. It's important to recognize that the original word means a winner in a warrior context, because that is no longer the world we live in. Win-lose behavior is extractive and destructive and there are better options available to us. To create real change we need to adopt more effective patterns that lead to better outcomes. Do we really want to embed speed, force, and muscle, the tools for overcoming prey and defending against predators, as a significant organizational building block? Sometimes for sure, but power is a hammer looking for a nail, when ofter there's a better tool for the job.

What to do about it

Power is not inherently bad for organizations, but it has costs, and it is often over-used or unconsciously deployed when other choices would be more effective. The common fixes for its negative effects are expensive and often ineffective, which is what makes it a trap: people feel like they can't win. The way out is to clarify your business strategy and align the organization in a more intentional way. Either pick the traditional organization and purify it, the way you would flip a house, or pick a human-centered organization and build it differently. The hybrid in between is messy, expensive, and ineffective.

Four places to start. 1. Recognize that the traditional organization is built on the use of power to control outcomes. 2. Audit your "best practices" and identify where power is used to drive or control performance. 3. Align stakeholders around a customer and clarify how your approach meets that customer's needs. 4. Evaluate how your organization could more effectively create value for that customer. The design will unfold from there, but it might not look like a hierarchy.