Designing Power in Systems Change

Systems work involves finding leverage in the systems in which you’re operating, and understanding the dynamics that are involved between the various stakeholders.

Key to understanding the context you’re working in is being able to explore a few key questions:

1. What is influencing the players to act the way they are acting?
2. Among our stakeholders, how might they exert influence to bring about the change they want to make?
3. What resistance might we experience in these efforts, and how will it manifest?

In many recent projects I have seen shadows of these questions, whether talking about climate governance, multi-stakeholder partnerships, food systems transformation or the societal effects of technology.

From a design standpoint, I found myself looking for a model both to interpret the dynamics I was seeing, but also to inform an intervention that might achieve maximum leverage.

So, while my projects were on exploring “the rules of the game”, what I ended up wanting to model was power; how were some actors able to translate their agendas into influence over the thoughts and actions of others? How could those working to improve the system exert their own influence?

In my research, I came across Suerie Moon’s exceptional paper Power in Global Governance: An Expanded Typology, which is well worth the read. While focused on public health, her combination and extension of other, past explorations of power are much more broadly relevant. I have adapted her typology for the first iteration of this model, which I have been using to analyze inbound influence, and to design systemic interventions.

But first, the element that stood out for me from Moon’s paper was her definition of power: the ability to make someone think of do something. Conversely, it is the ways in which others can make you think or do something.

In this post I’ll just outline the types of power; I’ll be exploring some of the clusters, dynamics and influences in other posts. The types of power explored in this model are as follows:

1. Physical – this is motivation through real force, or the threat of force; the ability to give, or revoke, physical safety
2. Economic – the control and use of resources to exert influence 
3. Cultural – the complex mix of norms, social position, tradition and shared social reality
4. Institutional – rules, laws and the imagined structures which sustain them
5. Moral – the ability to define shared understanding of right and wrong
6. Expert – the structures, processes and social positions which establish facts and truth
7. Narrative – influencing through the creation of language and framing of an issue or concept
8. Network – the use of personal relationships to achieve an outcome

All of these avenues are bi-directional, meaning, they are both channels through which we, ourselves are influenced, but also conduits for individuals or groups to exert their own influence.

The relative influence of each type of power might vary in different systems, and concentrations or combinations of multiple types of power can lend significant influence to certain actors.

I have also added in “spiritual” power, which I will be exploring elsewhere. While you could argue for this as institutional, cultural, narrative or moral, I believe this to be a distinct, though currently underdeveloped element.

I have made no mention of the ethics of this as a design model, primarily because it is based, in part, on what I have been observing already “in the wild”, and my goal was thus to try and make it explicit.

Finally, a few interesting lenses to apply to these types of power are Marx’s base/superstructure; Noah-Harari’s shared, fictional realities; Laloux’s organization types and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

What questions come up when you look at this model? How does it apply to the dynamics in the systems you’re working in?