New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans

In the story of how Francis has approached these big challenges, we can start to pick out the skills unique to leadership in a new power world. Signaling is the way a new power leader makes a crowd feel more powerful through his speech, gestures, or actions.

Structuring is how a new power leader puts in place structures and practices that enable the participation and agency she seeks to build.

Shaping is how a new power leader sets the overall norms and direction of her crowd, especially in ways that go beyond her formal authority. When a leader is successful, these norms become so well understood that they are adopted and upheld by the crowd itself, and no longer rely on the leader.

Her vision was of much more than a Lady Gaga fan page. She wanted the site and its branding to be not primarily about her work, but about fostering her fans’ confidence and artistry. The result, LittleMonsters.com, allowed her legions to share their comments, art, ideas, and stories with one another, as well as to organize events. She quickly had a million participants.

With Gaga’s call to action, senators’ lines were flooded with so many phone calls that the switchboard was overloaded. Her campaign forced the Senate to update their phone system to better handle incoming citizen calls. As one headline put it: “U.S. Senate Getting Gaga-Compliant Phone System.”

But his initiative is a fascinating case of how even a leader with good intentions could have gotten the three Ss—signaling, structuring, and shaping—so wrong.

Simply “consulting” your base is a rudimentary application of new power and not likely to generate meaningful feedback. Truly structuring for participation requires more. Paradoxically, in the absence of this, an old power strategy might have helped: holding closed, online, or confidential forums can create a pathway for brutally honest feedback.

Looking back, Glaze concedes that what the NRA did so well was “getting off your own agenda for five minutes.” By releasing control of its crowd, at the potential cost of being able to claim a win, it created the freedom that gave people true ownership of the movement. (We’ll say it one last time: It’s only a movement if it moves without you.)

What works so well for TED is that these two user experiences—the ultra-VIP attending the Vancouver conference and the ordinary person sharing one of the talks—rely on a similar set of incentives, just on very different levels. Like the jeweler Tiffany, which can whisk a billionaire upstairs to a private salon to inspect the rarest diamonds while it welcomes selfie-snapping tourists in its lobby showroom, TED is able to offer a select few access to the very top of the market and a little something for everyone else. This bifurcation has largely reinforced the value proposition for both sides.

Had TED remained a purely closed shop, it is hard to imagine it would have retained its relevance.

Taken together, TED’s four communities offer a master class in how to blend power under one unifying organizational brand. The three new power worlds it has built around its old power conference have turned it into one of the most effective media platforms in the world.

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.

Those who master the skills we have laid out in this book will be able to shift between old and new power as situation and strategy demands: to flip from open to closed, to toggle between “movement” and “institution,” to know when to control and when to release control.

The online service TINYPulse is a user-friendly solution that asks employees one simple question each week. This provides two benefits. First, it offers an outlet for those expecting a chance to share their views. Second, it provides managers with regular doses of data that can be aggregated, analyzed, and, ideally, acted upon.

What Buurtzorg gets so right is it puts human beings front and center. It focuses on how to get teams of people to form deep connections with one another (which is why they turn nurses into interior designers). Buurtzorg uses technology to enable better peer coordination, but it doesn’t lead with it, a lesson the Holacrats (and some in Silicon Valley) have yet to learn.

With more than 24 million members, Care.com is where millions of families in the United States and nineteen other countries go to find nannies, babysitters, and elder care.

A small glimpse of this is coworker.org, a platform that allows anyone to start a workplace-level campaign, with or without a union, from Starbucks baristas who agitated for more staff to Uber drivers who fought to have tips introduced on the platform, and won.

Berners-Lee’s Solid project would allow us to own our own data as part of a personal secure “pod” in which we would carry around our digital lives. So imagine that, rather than having all your data on a third-party platform, you now take it with you. (This is what geeks call “interoperability.”) You walk around with your photos, friends, health histories, a map of all the places you have traveled, a list of all your purchases—even the online reputation you have built up in various platforms, an especially powerful commodity. You are liberated to decide what access you would like to grant—and on what terms—to whom. Solid is much more than a different kind of technology; it is a different philosophy. With Solid your data “reports to you.”

But we need something different: a world where our participation is deep, constant, and multi-layered, not shallow and intermittent. Think of this world as the “full-stack society.”

At the core of De Correspondent’s proposition is a critical new power idea. As Ernst-Jan Pfauth, Wijnberg’s co-founder and publisher, puts it: “The people previously known as ‘the audience’ constitute the greatest source of knowledge, expertise and experience to which journalists have access. Yet this resource has been under-utilized for more than a century and a half.” He adds: “We believe that modern journalists shouldn’t see their readers as a passive group of annoying followers. Instead, they should regard readers as a potential gold mine of expert information.”

Newspapers like The Guardian and the New York Times are beginning to cotton to this, launching big “membership drives” that emphasize their higher social mission. But the real participation premium will be won by getting off their pedestals and inviting their readers to join in.

As Tang put it with characteristic enthusiasm: “It takes five seconds and it really feels like you’re helping the country! This is both useful, simple, rewarding and fun. This is the key of crowdsourcing: whenever there is a way to measure the progress of the player, people can spend hours without sleep to finish the game!”

We all need to build models—and seek out models—that help everyday people like us gain a sense of ownership and connection to one another and to society at large. “Participation” needs to be much more than the website that allows you to point out occasional potholes in the street; it needs to be a constant and compelling experience that keeps people working together on the things that matter.