Power relationships and empowerment
September 16, 2008
Power both enables people to achieve their goal and prevents them from achieving them. I want to reveal these relationsihps to everyone in an org.
Power relationships and empowerment
This is, fundamentally, the kind of thing I am concerned about:
An organization is a network of power relationships. In a power relationship, one actor possesses power over another when they have something that the other desires, and when they have the freedom to deal with the other in a way that the other may not have intended or even wanted. Power both enables people to achieve their goal (if they are allied with the holder that power, or possess it themselves) and prevents them from achieving them (if they are not allied with the holder of power). Established members of organizations are likely to know what other members have power, what the nature of that power is (expertise, knowledge, social connections, hierarchy or otherwise), and where they are in the social network in relation to those other members. This knowledge helps them to choose effective strategies in cooperative and competitive games such as knowledge acquisition and sharing, and generally in accomplishing both the individual actor’s and the organizations goals.
So what I’m looking for is knowledge about who holds various kinds of power the organization, over whom they exert that power, and in what way. What I want to do is share that knowledge equally with everyone in the organization so that both individuals and the organization itself can first clearly the nature of the landscape they act in. I do this with the hope that such knowledge will empower the individuals and the org both to first become more savvy about how power affects them in accomplishing their goals and second to allow them to adjust the balances of power in order to better support both organizational and individual goals.
Much of this is typically hidden or tacit knowledge (the knowledge that exists only in people’s heads), which must be painstakingly learned through the direct experiences of an actor in the context of the organization. I want to reveal that information, and do it in a clear way, hopefully an intuitive way, so that everyone in the org, even new people, or disadvantaged people, can easily understand and act on it, and also annotate it with their own knowledge.
