Power

Organisational cultures maintain and create inequity, and so any understanding or work on them must acknowledge the presence of power and the various ways it works to achieve this.

Like gravity or electricity, we can’t ‘see’ power, but it is still observable because its effects – negative and positive – are everywhere. In organisational life, power is both a social and technical thing. Social because we embody and enact power in our relationships, and because organisational cultures nudge us towards behaving in those ways that they consider ‘normal’. Technical because the design of an organisation categorises and distributes people and their relationships in ways that create unequal power relations – for example in the arrangement of formal and informal hierarchies.

New power and old power

One helpful way to think about power when it comes to organisational change is the idea of ‘new power’ and ‘old power’. Both kinds are today ever-present in organisational life, though they are very different.

Old Power: works like a currency, where power is hoarded and held by a few individuals at the top of a hierarchy. In organisations where old power is dominant, access to, and control of, information and resources are limited to those in positions of authority, and decisions are usually made and imposed top-down.

New Power: works more like a current, with power multiplying as it is decentralised. In organisations with a lot of new power, participation, transparency and the sharing of ideas and resources ensure power is continuously released by the culture. New power flows through networks, collaboration and peer-to-peer engagement, and is accelerated by technology and social forms of media.

The complexity and stability of organisational cultures, and the unequal power relations embedded in them, means that both old and new power have an important part to play. While we might recognise many health and care organisations as being old power, and new power as offering an appealing alternative – the reality is that there is a balance to be struck. For example, simply dialling up new power things like participation, transparency and collaboration in your organisation won’t, by itself, address inequity; it will simply benefit a few, and probably the same, people. But when you combine the democratic participation of new power with the exercise of formal authority that comes with old power, you can insist, organisationally, on a more inclusive outcome.

Understanding and using both old and new forms of power thoughtfully in OD work can help you design change activities that have a better chance of achieving your intended impact.

‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.’

Alice Walker (writer)

Journal prompt:

What are some of the ways you personally embody and use old and new forms of power? How much of this is a conscious choice? What opportunities exist for you to use new or old power in your OD work? Share your thoughts in the comments.