Stephen Billing’s Blog

I have recently spent a couple of days in the company of Alan Weiss talking about strategy – in particular strategy implementation. My clients hire me for planning and implementation of change projects related to strategy, and so I am very interested in this topic.

There are many matrices, models, formulas and recipes for doing strategy. No doubt you have seen a few of these yourself over the years.

From where I stand, strategy formulation and implementation in organisations are themes in the pattern of conversations myriad ongoing conversations taking place in that organisation.

From that point of view, the strategy models, matrices and other artefacts have little value in themselves. This is because they do not convey some message or meaning in themselves. The usefulness of the models, matrices and recipes is not in the elaborateness or sophistication of the model, nor even the theoretical rigour of the model or matrix itself.

The usefulness is rather in the conversations sparked by the models and matrices. These conversations in turn help move strategy along if they result in people making new sense of the organisation and what it is doing. 

It is interesting to think about what conversations you are taking part in about strategy in your organisation.

More importantly, what are your people saying when they talk about your organisation and where it is heading?

It is both practical and interesting to think about power if you are trying to change your organisation. Instead of seeing power as being like an amulet, that one person holds over another, Norbert Elias had a very different way of thinking about power.

Elias saw power as an inevitable characteristic of all human relating. He saw power as a function related to the need that one person has for another. If I need you more than you need me, then at that time, the balance of power will be tilted towards you and away from me.

In this way of thinking, power exists only in relationship between people. Power is not a thing in itself that can exist outside of human relationships. Rather it is relational in nature.

To illustrate, Elias gives extreme examples where the power seems to be weighted completely in favour of one party, such as a baby and its parents, and a master/slave relationship.

Elias points out that a baby has power over its parents, just as much as the parents have power over the baby. At least, the baby has power over the parents for as long as the parents attach value to the baby. The parents may abandon the baby if it cries too much. Through the socialisation process the baby eventually learns what the limits of its power are, through interaction with its parents.

In the case of the master and the slave, another seemingly lopsided power relationship, Elias acknowledges that the master has power over the slave, but that the slave also has power over the master in proportion to his or her function for master and the master’s dependence on the slave.

How is this talk of babies and slaves relevant for organisations?

Consider the example of a manager / subordinate relationship in terms of the argument above. It is readily evident that the manager has power over the subordinate. What is less evident is that the subordinate also has power by dint of the subordinate’s functionality for the manager. In any change initiative, the staff have the ability to exert power by going along with the change or not going along with it. The manager and those reporting to the manager are interdependent – they rely on each other. They are not isolates bumping up against each other. Power is in an ever-changing balance between the two, depending on the relative need each feels for the other at the time.

Thinking of power in this relational way that Elias proposed shifts the attention away from the manager as an individual possessed of powerful characteristics by dint of position power and influencing power, to thinking of specific relationships between specific managers and specific subordinates.

It is then possible to see that the power balance is always shifting – it is not a static thing. With this way of thinking it becomes possible to identify shifting power balances between manager and direct report. And it also becomes possible to identify shifting power balances across an organisation.

And this is a very valuable perspective to have when leading organisational change.

Power is a topic that is not much talked about in organisations, at least not overtly in my experience. And yet it is a fundamental component of our organisational relationships as human beings within an explicit hierarchical structure. Hierarchies of management mean that some people have more power than others. I am referring to power as the ability to make certain things happen that would not otherwise happen.

Why is it that such a pervasive feature of organisational life is so little written about in the organisational literature, or discussed in every day organisational life? Especially considering that power is such an important part of the CEO or senior manager’s ability to get things done.

Norbert Elias suggests in his 1984 book What is Sociology, that one reason power is not a fit subject for discussion is because of the numerous examples of abuse of power and the harm done by powerful people to others.