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October 21 - November 11, 2018
New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.
There has always been a dialectic between bottom-up and top-down, between hierarchies and networks.
New power models are enabled by the activity of the crowd—without whom these models are just empty vessels. In contrast, old power models are enabled by what people or organizations own, know, or control that nobody else does—once old power models lose that, they lose their advantage. Old power models ask of us only that we comply (pay your taxes, do your homework) or consume. New power models demand and allow for more: that we share ideas, create new content (as on YouTube) or assets (as on Etsy), even shape a community (think of the sprawling digital movements resisting the Trump
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A recent study in Applied Psychology found that “cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers”—who find themselves ostracized by the rest of the group.
Those with new power values are less committed but more affiliative—and that’s a paradox many old power institutions are now grappling with.
The Ice Bucket Challenge worked not because it was a perfect piece of content, like Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, but because it created a compelling context to seed activity by people all around the world. It was a blueprint for action dropped into the fast-moving current of ideas and information, ready to be taken in countless directions, in countless forms.
It asks an organization to consider how action by its community can be embedded in the very structure of its communications.
“People actually begin changing behavior when [an] idea gets validated by their community, rarely when it has not.”
form loose, open source communities of interest or swarms that can swarm back and push back against the ISIS message. It’s not an impossible thing to do. It can be done.”
All this pushback, ironically, supercharged GetUp’s credibility.
Anti fragile
was a coherent but ever-changing new power brand, generously shared among designers—amateur and professional—all over the world. It was ownerless in the sense that anyone could lay claim to it.
TEDsters have an opportunity to adapt TED’s original content by joining its army of volunteer translators who interpret the business jargon and pop science that TED is best known for into their own languages.
Today’s most cutting-edge activists understand both how to create frictionless entry points and move people up the participation scale.
The American civic leader John W. Gardner believed that “civilization is a drama lived in the minds of a people.”
charged with making the Reddit community thrive and with advancing the interests of Reddit Inc.—goals that, as we’ll discuss, are not always compatible with each other, or with those of the community.
local versions of ridesharing apps might even start to assemble some kind of “federated platform,” with different communities owning and tending their own patches of the same ecosystem.
When these returns come together, they create what we think of as the “participation premium.” Star Citizen offers something in return in the form of the promised game and ships and higher purpose in joining the mission to revive the PC sim. Participation supercharges both: it offers you citizenship in a lively community of fellow dreamers, and even offers the chance to change the game itself.
A conspiracy of optimism is hard to unravel.
The original universe that the fans purchased from RSI—should it ever arrive—will likely never be as immersive, rich, or dynamic as the universe they have already created together.
The crowd cannot be seen as an asset to be strip-mined: any new power strategy needs to consider what’s really in it for the people you want to engage with.
The price of occasional public failure can seem higher than quietly managing decline. Yet they are essential figures in organizations wishing to transform.
success wasn’t that you personally had the answer, but that you were open to experiment, ready to find answers in unexpected places and from unexpected people.
It’s about the ways new power tools are unexpectedly being used to strengthen and reinforce leaders with deeply old power values. And it is about emerging forms of leadership that aspire to bring together new power tools and new power values in order to meaningfully redistribute power.
Obama’s approach to participation was highly structured and crafted, where Trump’s was unstructured to the point of anarchy.
Shaping the norms of his flock is a subtler task than the traditional exercise of authority.
He is attempting to transport his church away from an old power paradigm, defined by clergy handing down judgments on their people, chastising their behaviors, dividing them into saints and sinners, the included and excluded. He is gradually shaping a church that focuses less on inward debates about rules and more on outward demonstrations of its core values.
Monsters feel just the right amount of the same and just the right amount of different.
LEADERSHIP IN A TIME OF HASHTAGS
the nature of the work is about shaping, trying to shape this network politically,”
untethered officially yet strategically aligned with the NRA’s interests.
“The benefit of pushing money downward and letting people do with it what they will is that very often they will do with it what you want.
that threat is made more potent and credible through the application of new power.
The NRA draws on the strength, gravitas, and resources of a big institution and the energy and creativity of a social movement.
The structure of TEDx is less similar to a distributed movement like the hacker collective Anonymous—where anyone can claim membership and take things in whatever direction they please—and more like a franchise, where a service agreement enforces specific expectations.
“We’re looking for those serendipitous interactions where we virtually bump into somebody in the hallway talking about the problem that we’re running into right now, and they say, ‘Yeah, actually in my previous job, or maybe in my current job, I’m working on this.’ They are looking to find that member who will respond something like: ‘This is my hobby. I’m all over this topic. Let me tell you what you need to do.’ ”
What Podemos teaches us is how to avoid the fate of fizzle. Of all the organizations in this chapter, it began with the greatest ideological commitment to new power. Yet its success depended on constant pragmatism. They were careful not to be overly dazzled by the promise of social media, nor live on the adrenaline of protest alone. Founders were always willing to pivot to old power when the situation demanded.
But it is smarter to see these expectations as signals that the workplace has failed to create the satisfying feedback loops that have multiplied in other aspects of our lives. Research from the Young Entrepreneur Council shows that 80 percent of millennials would prefer to get feedback in “real time.” A 2014 Millennial Impact Report showed that “more than half (53%) of respondents said having their passions and talents recognized and addressed is their top reason for remaining at their current company.”
As we are more and more the creators of our own myths, leaders of our own communities, stars of our own shows. New power dynamics make the desire for the “founder feeling” much more widespread.
Founders experience the joys (and terrors) of transparency. They know how much everyone is being paid, how much money is in the bank, whether the business paid its taxes on time. These are precisely the same kinds of demands we see from younger workers, who increasingly feel entitled to the kind of information usually reserved for senior executives or even CEOs, from full salary transparency on down.
Madelon’s most vital piece of infrastructure is her access to all the other nurses. BuurtzorgWeb is a kind of new power network that facilitates learning, peer support, and the development of shared resources across teams. It allows Madelon to confer with 10,000 other nurses if she has a question about a particular disease or a tricky patient situation.
The power of networks
Holacracy is like new power for robots.
As we look to the future of work, it’s easy to imagine a bifurcation: the vast majority of work shaped by the financial logic of automation and the mathematical logic of the algorithm, alongside a small number of hyper-empowered “founders” with tremendous agency, access to capital, and capacity to innovate.
“What’s interesting is that if you teach the case of the music industry in the late 2000s, what you see is radical decentralization and breakup. When you teach it five years ago, it’s the beginning of the emergence of mid-level structures to allow artists to make a living. Voluntary donations, SoundCloud…Then you’re teaching it in 2016 and it’s basically all Spotify. It’s completely recentralized.”
To close this gap, it will be critical to actually reduce wealth and income inequality and change the material conditions of those who have been left behind. But a subtler challenge is in how we create more meaningful opportunities for people to actively shape their lives and connect with the institutions that shape them.
New power values: A belief in informal governance, opt-in decision-making, collaboration, radical transparency, maker culture, and short-term affiliation.
