Power Dynamics and Organizational Futures

 

Organizations of all types must be persistently resilient, creative and innovative as they face pitiless turbulence and rapidly accelerating change in their environments.  However, the power dynamics in organizational life frequently thwart their ability to act and react with sufficient agility. 

Every organization and every social system has a power structure.  Some individuals and teams are more influential than others.  Some use their power in ways that make them more rigid, and others use it in ways that make their organizations more nimble. Some organizations incline toward a command and control power structure while others foster distributed leadership.  Too much hierarchy and power politics can result in organizational paralysis.  By using power to build partnership and organizational learning, the prospect of success in today’s hyper-complex environment is vastly increased. 

Michael just completed his 25^th year as a coach, anthropologist and trainer for the internationally recognized Power Lab.   Through this work, he is continually studying the use of power and organizational dynamics.  He applies his learning and insights to Art of the Future’s consulting, speaking, training and writing practices.  Michael’s view of the Power Lab has been included in two recent, comprehensive publications by Jossey-Bass, Organization Development and Business Leadership.  A pre-publication draft of one of these articles, “The Power of Position,” can be found on Art of the Future’s website.

More on the Power Lab….

The Power Lab is a richly textured simulation that is the primary research setting for Barry Oshry, one of Organization Behavior’s most creative and influential thinkers. It is hard to boil this elegant and elaborate work down to a single sentence, but here’s one attempt:  Systems make people and people make systems.  Systems can liberate people’s greatness—collectively and individually—or they can become drudgery.  People can lead systems and make them noble, or cement them in pettiness.  The power of people and their systems are integrally intertwined.

At the Power Lab, people are “birthed” into simulated positions which are designed to focus attention on power dynamics; how power is used and how it might be used.

• The Societal Experience has been the subject of numerous books and articles.  Here participants act as

o       Elites, who own all of the society’s material resources,

o       Immigrants, who have to make their way through the sale of their labor, and

o       Managers, who run the institutions owned and controlled by the Elites. 

This is 24/7 simulation whose duration is like life:  indeterminate but finite: it will end, but you don’t know when!  Most participants learn lessons about themselves in social systems and about power dynamics they never forget.

• The Organization Workshop, as described in detail in this link, place people in positions that reflect the existence of an organization within a turbulent environment, as either a “Top” with overall strategic responsibility, a “Bottom” who does specific work to produce the organization’s goods and services, as a “Middle” who lives at the interface between Tops and Bottoms, or as a “Customer” who needs and uses the organization’s products.  The Organization Workshop can be conducted with as few as twelve and as many as 150 participants.  This workshop can run anywhere between four hours and two days.  This is one of Art of the Future’s workshop offerings.

• Merging Cultures is a simulation that focuses on the social distinctiveness of human systems.  Any group of people that is historically unique because of race, creed, geography, etc. will display the distinguishing characteristics of its culture and/or subculture.  This is certainly true of organizations, and that is one of the reason that so many mergers and acquisitions fail!  Merging Cultures unfolds a fascinating educational experience by using a simple physical distinction—height—to create different cultures. 

Turning people loose within the context of the micro-world created by simulation and punctuating their learning experience with various conceptual inputs is a common ingredient of all of the components of the Power Lab.