Power can be seen in two lights, coercive and connective. Coercive power is power based on control through a center or a set of connected centers. Connective power is power gained through linking objects of need to objects of fulfillment.
For many years, I was an urban planner - or at least an extension of one. I worked for government agencies and for traditional consulting engineering companies. While I learned a lot from those experiences and did good work, I was never fully at peace.
One central reason was that I valued connective power and showed disdain for coercive power. I was often accused of "going around" people to get things done. Did things get done? Yes. So completing an action of benefit to the organization was much less preferable than going through the established lines of communication in the organization.
In other words, I did not respect the established coercive power structure.*
Now, the catch, all of my orgs, government or otherwise, considered themselves relatively flat. Compared to their peers, they may well have been, but the weren't flat, they weren't rigid hierarchies either. They were a mish mash of policies that both rewarded and punished non-coercive action.
What is Coercive Power?
In a traditional hierarchy, and in most relationships that involve rank, coercive power hinges on information gates.
Here we have the standard org chart. A world-view so complete that every flowcharting tool in the world covers it. The org chart immediately highlights the information gates in the organization.
Mr. Slate has three direct reports (for simplicity), who also each have three direct reports. (In organizations we are currently working with, there are some people who have over 100 direct reports).
In the official world of Org Charts, any information created by any of the proles needs to filter up through the human PM interface, to Mr. Slate who will then communicate it to the Head Cheese or to the other C-Level people. If the C-level people find it necessary, they will communicate it down to their direct reports and so on.
Coercive power flows through this system by controlling what information goes to whom and when. If Mr. Slate has dozens of direct reports and is always flying around the world looking for more purchasers of the company's rocks, this obviously hampers the flow of communication even more.
People then become highly dependent on Mr. Slate and his availability. A massive set of transaction costs then grow around Mr. Slate. Problems come up and Mr. Slate is an obvious bottleneck.
But the organization is not built to support any other types of information flow. Therefore, when problems arise, there is no elegant fix for them.
To cope with this, Mr. Slate, rather than figuring out ways to re-route information (therein undermining the corporate structure and taking away his granted power-source), resorts to ways to get information to him more "efficiently". And, there are your forms.
So Fred, Barney and Hud are buried in forms designed to get Mr. Slate the information he needs to manage effectively. These forms have zero value for Fred and the middle managers and provide an incomplete view to Mr. Slate. No one has the ability to protest because Mr. Slate is using his positional (coercive) power to enforce the decisions.
Mr. Slate then ends up in meetings with the C-level staff and the other C-level people see how organized he is. Forms just look organized. Soon the forms move virally throughout the org as a way of standardizing information provided to the C-level staff.
Coercive power is borne from hierarchical structures. It gives rise to the other negative elements of coercive power (bullying, opaque management decisions, ladder-climbing, etc.). In the end, it becomes apparent that these are symptoms of information hoarding and information bottlenecks.
Connective Power
"In a Hierarchy almost everyone is critical, since the loss of any one person's connection disrupts communication to everyone connected through that person." - Clay Shirky "Here Comes Everybody."
The funny thing about it is, if Fred Flinstone finally wises up and goes off to open his own company with Mr. Slate, the org doesn't fall apart. How can this be so? Both Fred and Mr. Slate kept that place going! If they were truly that operationally important in the company would experience paroxysms and an utter information meltdown.
Oddly, a few things might happen. First off, the paperwork would falter. Which would provide the illusion of a catastrophe. But work would still get done.
Why? Because the org never needed the paperwork in the first place. What it needed was Lucy Magilicuddy.
Connective Power
As the red lines overlaid on to the org chart clumsily show, Lucy is the person in Amalgamated Entertainment that knows what's going on. Even before we knew what social networking was, we said these people were connected.
So in Amalgamated Entertainment, if you want something to get done, you go to Lucy. That's why everybody loves her.
Lucy has connective power. She can't force anyone to do anything. The organization gives her zero coercive power, and if she tries to use coercive power - her relative power will diminish.
What Lucy can do, is give you office intelligence, connect you with other people and facilitate progress. She does this without forms, without positional power and often without official acknowledgement.
The org chart shows positional power, the CEO is at the top and only recognized communications channels are shown. Lucy's overlay shows us that actual communication throughout the organization is anything but the org chart. If anything, the org chart merely shows trails of official blame and overhead.
Here we see a social networking diagram of Amalgamated Entertainment that highlights Lucy's Connective Power. No one directly reports to Lucy in the org chart, yet she has 13 connections throughout the organization. She hears, directly from people's mouths, what is happening in every team throughout the org.
Compare her to the CEO who has 5 direct connections. The CEO's information is highly filtered through official channels. The line-noise and transaction costs of these communications channels directly impact the quality of information the CEO receives. Note also, that he is getting his information directly from the least informed people in the org.
Fred F., by contrast, also has unofficial lines of communication throughout the organization. His 9 lines of communication are second only to Lucy's. And his direct connection to Lucy fills in a lot of the gaps.
Hud R. is comfortable in his positional power and simply has not taken the time to form relationships throughout the company. Fred and Hud share the same coercive Power, but Fred enjoys a much higher degree of connective power.
What I've Found
I've found that even in the most coercive environments, connective networks are alive and well. In the worst cases, they are abolished upon discovery.
Coercive environments tend to be successful when led by people who personify the best possible coercion. These tend to be narcissistic personality types who can simultaneously get people to perform under them and play the power games necessary to succeed and move up the ladder. They are spawn-at-all-cost types.
The problem is that these types of people use positional power to get their desires fulfilled. Staff below them say "yes boss" and perform the proscribed tasks, but those tasks have no context or relevance. "Yes, I'll fill out the form", "Yes, I'll do this mundane task."
This gets the job done in the short term, but leaves residue in the works of the corporate machine. People want to leave the organization, they are demoralized. At best, they want to work their way up the ladder more than anything else. Their actions, while often benefiting the company, usually benefit their own aspirations.
Connective environments under coercive environments are are most often coping mechanisms. "I was given this task, but policies won't let me complete it. Can you help me?" Or "I was given this task and I know I'm not supposed to speak to anyone without approval, can you meet me after work and talk about how you did something similar?" In both cases, the connective environment was created to specifically thwart organizational policy in order to achieve an organizational goal.
Intentional connective environments tend to be teamwork and goal focused. Rewards are not trickle-down, but awarded based on production. Staff is allowed to actually do a good job, see the benefits of work well done, and share in rewards. They are also self-perpetuating. The nature of social networks is that connections are rewarded.
A simplistic way of looking at this is: the more connections, the easier information flows. Connective environments rely on people with connective power to filter needs vs. capabilities and make the appropriate connections. They rely on the functional Lucys over the administrative Slates.
Where are your org's Lucys and how are they helping you around your Slates? How are those relationships dysfunctional? What can be done to acknowledge and strengthen them?
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*Having said that, I'm not going to duck away from the fact that I was also young and impulsive and tended to let my ideas get ahead of my or the org's ability to handle them.
You're covering a lot here, and I agree with what I think are your primary points. But, I think it's wrong to place the blame on hierarchical structures themselves, as compared with how coercive approaches can be magnified in many cases by hierarchies.
I definitely think a lot of organizations fail in structural ways, and that very often an aspect of their structural failure is what they do through their org chart hierarchy (i.e., all the things you are critiquing so well).
But, hierarchies can work in all kinds of ways. They are, in fact, simply a type of connection--and really smart organizations get that and use their hierarchies as infrastructure for fostering a connective environment. When this happens, a little hierarchy goes a long way--and *that* is actually the deeper issue: how to use hierarchy to effectively distribute power rather than lock it up at the top.
A connective organization also might use hierarchies to, for example, nullify the situation Shirky describes. In other words, the hierarchy exists specifically as a fail-over mechanism. I have seen orgs think this way by drawing their org chart upside down--management is an infrastructure layer at the bottom.
I don't know the context of Shirky's statement, but on its own, it's wrong. Hierarchy is not a prescription for a disconnected organization; and lack of hierarchy is likewise not a prescription for a connected organization.
We (web people) have to watch out for making hierarchy into a bugbear. It's actually anti-web to be anti-hierarchy, because, if you recognize that there is a web of connections, then you really should recognize that hierarchy is just one possible kind of web of connections.
Posted by: Jay Fienberg | 27 May 2008 at 23:56