Leadership and Power Shift
The Unconscious Dichotomy that is Holding Us Back
You’ve probably read about it, or even written about it yourself: Humanity is on the journey into a new age. It appears that evolution is giving our consciousness capacities for integrating polarities, embracing wholeness, and deeply understanding the connectedness of everything.
On this journey, we humans are invited to move away from an egocentric worldview, towards the transpersonal, non-dual, ecocentric, or — as Bill Plotkin calls it in his work — the soul centric.
When humanity’s consciousness develops, we naturally change the way we go about things. We’ve seen this in previous collective leaps, for instance in the way society was reordered during the shift from agrarian to empire era. We must organize ourselves in different ways. For decades now, we’ve been seeing the global emergence of new forms of organizing. This is expressed through solutions and movements like Self-Organization, Self-Management, Agile, Responsive, Teal, Sociocracy, and Holacracy.
I’ve spent the last decade deeply immersed in the field of self-organization, accompanying organizations and the people working in them into this completely new way of being and of doing work together. As a journey of personal development, it requires courage — and what can unfold when we embrace this journey is beautiful to behold.
I’ve seen one very specific aspect of this shift consistently hold people back. It relates to the intersection of two belief systems that are difficult to transcend — in effect, two stories that we are telling ourselves. These are our beliefs about leadership and power.
What we know
It’s widely known and accepted that the conventional power hierarchy has run its course. It’s too slow, too centralized, and too disempowering to people. In a movement first populated by small service and technology companies with unconventional startup cultures, organizations started to adapt their way of working. Now, as the movement spreads, even large, multinational corporations are exploring this new terrain — some by hand-picking departments to prototype different ways of organizing.
All new forms of organizing try to change the power hierarchy: with described rulesets, like Sociocracy and Holacracy, with “home-made”, or principle- or manifesto-based solutions described as Responsive, Agile, Teal, People Centric, or otherwise. Most of those approaches, however, fall short in actually improving life — confusion is common, and organizational dynamics and processes often fall back into old hierarchical patterns. Clearly something is getting in the way of allowing people and organizations to shift.
Moving into a soul centric society requires us to shift our understanding of what leadership is, what power is, and how to embody them both.
How leadership is defined
Think about how you would define “leadership”. You might or might not find a definition that you fully resonate with. If you don’t, no worries — you are not alone. The world is full of perspectives on this question, and some people fundamentally disagree about the true definition of leadership. There is no right or wrong. In my research, there’s one commonality that shows up in almost every definition of leadership, no matter how old or new the definition is, and whether its firmly rooted in the belief system of the top-down power hierarchy or in more contemporary approaches like Servant, Systemic, or Integral Leadership. Consistently, leadership is defined as traits of, and/or developmental levels of, “the leader(s)” and their observable behaviors. In other words, leadership is always anchored in INDIVIDUALS — people that point to, or inspire towards, a direction for others to follow.
If leadership is commonly understood as traits and behaviors of a leader, or a group of leaders, it anchors a clear distinction between those who are leaders and those who are not.
How power is defined
Power is a key concept in political and social sciences and has been discussed broadly in philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines. As with leadership, power has countless definitions. No matter how we define it, the huge impact of power and how it’s wielded is inarguable.
Here’s something less scientific, but solidly rooted in more than 20 years of experience in international leadership and organization development consulting. When it comes to organizations, power is generally attributed to people in hierarchy. The higher up in the hierarchy, the more power someone is considered to hold.
In a very general sense, power here is equated to the ability to drive things to move forward in the way someone wants them to. This “ability”, again very generally, is based on attribution: power is attributed to someone because of how their position in the hierarchy is perceived. The effects of this power can be positive or negative for both individuals and the collective, depending on how this person understands and embodies the responsibility of holding attributed power.
What’s holding us back
As our global society grows increasingly complex and interconnected, it seems ever more clear that the top-down power hierarchy has run its course. Numerous alternatives, in varying degrees of maturity are being explored and prototyped globally, and all of them are about distributing power and leadership. A close look at any of these alternative solutions, however, reveals that the key concepts of leadership and power are still tied to individuals and their traits. This corrupts the concept of distributed authority.
We have a global need for a power shift, with broad distribution and decentralization of decision-making authority. At the same time, there is an equally universal need for leadership. Herein lies what I perceive as an unconscious dichotomy, created by our deeply rooted stories about leadership and power: the fear that when we decentralize and distribute power, we lose leadership. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked questions rooted in this fear, and in the misconception that a true power shift requires the abandonment of “leadership” altogether.
Limited by this underlying story, many solutions end up compromising the power shift. This can look like adopting a structure for distributing authority, but still behaving according to habitual, “felt” authority of those perceived as “leaders”. This often leads to a sense of being stuck and disoriented.
What is needed
So what is power, and what is leadership, in the new consciousness that humanity appears to be moving towards? I am convinced we need completely new narratives that redefine both.
Clinging to our existing narratives around power and leadership stands in the way of humanity’s shift of consciousness.
Words are the anchors of narratives — they anchor meaning, emotions, and feelings, which ultimately define what we believe in. To create a new narrative, we can either tell a story using completely new words, or we can find useful and/or new definitions for existing words. In this way, we tell a new story by changing or clarifying word definitions. My approach here is the latter.
Whether you’re using new words or redefining existing ones, it is not enough to change how we write and speak. We must change how we live, embodying new concepts in our everyday life.
If we want to create new narratives, we need to embody our new stories, translate them into action, bringing them forward in how we live and who we become.
Resolving the unconscious dichotomy
Resolving the unconscious “distributed power vs. leadership” dichotomy holds great potential to move the needed power shift forward. Re-understanding power and leadership in ways that work with new organization has the potential for “breaching the dam”, so to speak: releasing a tremendous amount of stuck energy that wants to move forward.
Let us begin by finding useful definitions of leadership and power. Here’s a definition of leadership that has emerged through many conversations with clients, friends, and colleagues, and learnings from systems and complexity theory:
Leadership is the emergent property of a complex adaptive system to move towards a desired outcome.
I invite you to consider this definition within your workplace. If we see leadership as the emergent property of a complex adaptive system, we invite leadership — even require it — to be shared across the whole system. A system, defined on Wikipedia as “a collection of elements or parts that are organized for a common purpose,” has new potential when we imagine leadership as distributed among all its parts.
In modern society, our organizations are not only systems but complex, adaptive ones — this means that beyond the simple definition shared above, they have features such as being difficult or impossible to understand; behaving unpredictably; exhibiting continuous change in the relationships and connections among their parts; adapting constantly to their environment; and resisting control by any outside influence or by any one part of the system. This renders a habit of old leadership — to ”predict and control” outcomes and processes — impossible.
If we understand leadership as a capacity of a whole, complex, adaptive system, then self-organization makes sense. As we have seen in physics, chemistry, and biology, complex adaptive systems have the capacity to self-organize when left to it without attempts at interference and control. For more on this, check out my previous articles on self-organization and on what an organization is and isn’t.
Transcending conventional leadership
If we accept that leadership needs to be and can be distributed over all parts of a system, the organization’s pursuit of purpose becomes a whole system property without reliance on one acclaimed leader or a leadership team.
Transcending conventional leadership and moving to whole system leadership enables what has been called for for so long: a leader in every chair.
Look at your organization truly as a complex adaptive system, which ultimately mirrors the structure of an organism. It doesn’t have specific positions of appointed leaders — every part of the system leads itself and is at the same time interconnected and interdependent with all other parts. That is the way the system can self-organize to best serve its purpose.
This is what I call Whole System Leadership. With leadership anchored systemically, the organization shifts its entire way of governing and operating, based on rules and processes that are decentralized, distributed, transparent, and the same for all parts of the system — exactly as it is in nature. The “leaders in every chair” are invited to lead 1) themselves and 2) their work. They are autonomous yet interconnected and interdependent. This, I believe, is the only way for us to truly and fully collaborate while doing our work in the world.
Transcending power-over
If we understand leadership in this new way, where does that put power?
When moving from a power hierarchy to a decentralized and distributed system, the needed power shift is the biggest obstacle of all. For people who previously held power over others and the accompanying responsibilities, the shift feels like losing something which they probably worked hard to achieve. For those who previously held less organization power and therefore less responsibility, it can feel frightening to suddenly be accountable and powerful in new ways.
Both the sense of loss and the sense of fear arise because of our stories about what power is and how we personally like, or dislike, wielding it. To further complicate things, we can’t just throw out power altogether. Power is still needed, and we must understand how we relate to it, individually and collectively, in a distributed leadership system.
As with leadership, where we distinguish between leadership held by acclaimed leaders or leadership teams vs. leadership held within the whole system, we need to distinguish between old and new understandings of power. In new organizations, we need both systemic power and personal power. Together they form Whole System Power.
Systemic power is anchored in the whole system, decentralized, and distributed.
powershift.io defines 5 principles that enable the emergence of systemic power like this: Purpose. Structure. Awareness. Autonomy. Clarity.
With the distribution of power within a system, a new consciousness of personal power is possible. Just as we need “leadership in every chair”, we need “power in every chair”. When everyone steps into her or his authentic power and invites everyone else to do the same, our understanding shifts from “power over” to “power with” and ultimately to “power as”. Letting go of our understanding that power is something held by someone over someone else, then exploring our own authentic power, experiencing what changes in how we relate to each other under these new conditions, and ultimately accepting our new reality: we represent the power as it is, inside us and around us — interconnected and interdependent.
This enables us to transcend the story about what power is that we have been telling ourselves for so long.
On my search for a definition that captures something of this transcendence, I found , interestingly enough, a definition that is not new at all. Paul Tillich, a German-American Philosopher, who lived from 1886 to 1965, offered us this definition:
Power is the drive of everything living to self-realize with increasing intensity and extensity.
We can look at organizations as complex adaptive systems, like organisms. If we understand them as organic systems, power can be understood as the drive of this organic system to increasingly self-realize. If an organization has a purpose, then self-realization means realizing the purpose. In a successful self-organizing system, power — like leadership — becomes a whole system capacity.
Organizations reach their purpose through the decentralization and distribution of leadership and power. When they are successful at bringing forth Whole System Leadership and Whole System Power, organizations truly support humanity’s journey into a new consciousness and a future in which wholeness, integration, and a deep understanding of the connectedness of everything are embodied in the way we do our collective work together.
You can find a deep dive into the addressed (and many connected) topics in my book: New Stories of Love, Power, and Purpose; A Global Invitation to Experiment with the Unknown.
