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Power, as philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it, is the “ability to produce intended effects.”
Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.
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.
This hyperconnectedness has given birth to new models and mindsets that are shaping our age, as we’ll see in the pages ahead. That’s the “new” in new power.
New power models are enabled by the activity of the crowd—without whom these models are just empty vessels.
The future will be a battle over mobilization. The everyday people, leaders, and organizations who flourish will be those best able to channel the participatory energy of those around them—for the good, for the bad, and for the trivial.
How do you operate effectively within an organization in which your (perhaps younger) peers have internalized new power values like radical transparency or constant feedback?
How do you create an institution that inspires an enduring, mass following in an era of much looser, more transitory affiliation? How do you switch between old and new power? When should you blend them together? And when will old power actually produce better outcomes?
These scientists stopped thinking “The lab is my world” and started thinking “The world is my lab.”
Those with new power values are less committed but more affiliative—and that’s a paradox many old power institutions are now grappling with.
New power loves to affiliate, but affiliation in this new mindset is much less enduring. People are less likely to be card-carrying members of organizations or to forge decades-long relationships with institutions, but they are more likely to float between Meetup groups or use social media to very visibly affiliate with a range of causes, brands, and organizations, and rally their friends to do the same. They tend to opt in at particular moments, and then opt out again. We shouldn’t confuse this with a lack of engagement. Rather it is a different way of taking part. This shift has big
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“We don’t really care about doing things well, we just care about doing them together.”
What House does so well is to offer increased agency, flattened hierarchy, and a joyful embrace of diversity, the opposite of the quiet-in-the-pews, top-heavy, single-note experience that many find when they go to a traditional place of worship.
“meme drops”—whether images or phrases, across every type of media—that are designed to spread “sideways,” coming most alive when remixed, shared, and customized by peer communities, far beyond the control of the meme creator(s).
Actionable—The idea is designed to make you do something—something more than just admire, remember, and consume. It has a call to action at its heart, beginning with sharing, but often going much further. Connected—The idea promotes a peer connection with people you care about or share values with. Connected ideas bring you closer to other people and make you (feel) part of a like-minded community. This sets off a network effect that spreads the idea further. Extensible—The idea can be easily customized, remixed, and shaped by the participant. It is structured with a common stem that
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Its primary goal is not that its content be read, but that it be shared.
“People actually begin changing behavior when [an] idea gets validated by their community, rarely when it has not.”
This is why “connected” ideas matter so much. Today, the most resonant ideas are not those that get flashed at the highest number of people but those that become individualized expressions of affiliation and identity among peers.
All of these extensions make the movement stronger. Around the world, people take action at the same time and with the same intention, but the concept can be adapted to fit the local culture.
This drives ownership and resonance in a way a strict franchise-style model never could.
For an ACE idea, going viral is not just an explosion of sharing. It is allowing every carrier of the message to add a mutation that makes it more contagious for his or her own networks. People talk a lot about movements these days, but it’s only really a movement if it moves without you.
“Sometimes, it’s better to just leave it all, and just breathe.”
The future will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster, and more durably.
Step 1: Find your connected connectors
Think of this group as the “connected connectors,” those people who share a worldview, are networked to one another, and are influential in their reach. For any new power movement, identifying and cultivating the right connected connectors is often the difference between takeoff and fizzle.
Step 2: Build a new power brand
THE OWNERLESS BRAND
Yet there is a real skill—especially for old power institutions—in what Asha Curran, 92Y’s chief innovation officer and leader of the #GivingTuesday project, thinks of as “unbranding,” reducing the old power instinct to overwhelm campaigns or ideas with stamps of ownership, and by doing so allowing them to travel more widely.
But the new power era has promoted a form of activism that can be scaled much more quickly than a twentieth-century movement, and can be initiated by almost anyone, including those without a formal apparatus or an existing bully pulpit.
These movements can more easily include wider groups of people, including those who previously had been left on the sidelines or couldn’t easily participate.
But if you’re trying to build a movement or grow a crowd, you’ll need to unlock a series of new power behaviors.
Once you have recruited these new participants, the job is to keep them engaged and to move people up the scale, toward higher-barrier behaviors like adapting or remixing the content of others, crowdfunding a project, creating and uploading their own unique content or assets (we call this producing), or, at the top of the scale, by becoming a “shaper” of the community as a whole, with the capacity to influence the strategy, norms, and culture of a crowd, often without having any kind of formal authority. Think here of the Airbnb super-hosts who set norms for others on the platform, the
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Today’s most cutting-edge activists understand both how to create frictionless entry points and move people up the participation scale.
“As a new Lyft driver, you actually have to meet with a mentor, so that’s another, more experienced driver, and they’ll walk you through the ropes, do a spot check on your car, make sure that you’d basically be a good Lyft driver, and take you on a quick test drive around the block.” For Uber there is no such procedure for bringing new drivers on board. “It’s all done over email communications, so you can imagine that a lot of new Uber drivers really feel like they’re out there on their own. They have no interaction with other drivers, they have no interaction with passengers, they have no
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They don’t have coworkers that they can talk to, they don’t even have someone at the water cooler, because their car is their office. I think that’s the sense that you get, right from the onset, that Lyft does care.”
The Lyft story demonstrates some of the critical tactics and philosophies of creating a positive platform culture. It enlists its network participants as allies, or at least signals in this direction. It approaches the world with a human face, not just an algorithmic logic. It is working out ways to align pay and other incentives with a sense of decency and fairness. It invests in getting close to those in its network to better understand their challenges and realities.
Uber vs. Lyft is a story of design choices. How much agency and value should go to participants? How to recognize and reward super-participants, and how to create feedback loops that keep them coming back? Anyone wanting to understand the dynamics of a new power community—or design one for themselves—needs to wrestle with these key questions.
Well-designed, intangible reward systems can confer huge meaning for the individuals who take part in them.
At the heart of every successful new power platform is a great feedback loop.
The “people’s mic” was a tactic used in which the crowd at a general assembly would repeat what the speaker was saying in short phrases so everyone could hear. Initially created as a workaround because the police had cracked down on the use of megaphones, it came to represent Occupy’s ethos of participation and collective action. As social movement theorist Craig Calhoun put it, “The human megaphone evoked the decentralized, popular nature of the occupation; it made the group a demonstration of participatory democracy.”
To get the word out, Invisible Children started to organize small screenings in churches and on campuses. Think of these as mini-Sundances, where communities of people would come together around the movie to engage with it, discuss it, and—crucially—act on it, offering their voice, funds, and support. The screenings could not offer a huge blast of publicity, but they offered a different kind of value: deep connections to local audiences. For the next eight years, Invisible Children shaped and perfected this local model. They would typically have two “tours” a year, where they would debut a new
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something huge” and you’ll “blow their minds,” recalling “four-to-a-bed” sleeping arrangements and even quoting Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. It was a promise of agency and meaning, dressed up with a henna tattoo and a wink. The Roadies were earnestly trained, taught the history of the conflict in Uganda, given lessons from the civil rights movement, organized in teams of four, and paired with a survivor, often a former child soldier. By the time they finally set out on the road, they had already invested significant time and energy in the events they were planning, and so had their
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Over 90 percent had talked to friends/family about Invisible Children, 78 percent had purchased an Invisible Children item, 75 percent had made a donation, and 42 percent were part of an Invisible Children club or group. The Roadies and organizers had done a remarkable job of cultivating engaged participants.
These connections had come together in a perfect triangle. Invisible Children had found the right ways to reward, engage, and affirm all their constituents.
But from that base of “connected connectors” went into the hands of countless celebrities.
Their movies were just one element of a richer community experience, a great story that passed peer to peer like an epic poem, strengthened by each telling.
As balanced as Invisible Children’s community had been, it had also been fairly isolated from key influencers like academics and bloggers who worked on the issue. It had flown under the radar of the major media.
The film also shifted focus away from the community and onto Jason Russell as a charismatic leader figure. He aspired, as a strategy, to connect directly with the likes of Bono and Buffett, enlisting his base to help him do so. But where the old model of Invisible Children made thousands of people feel like leaders, this approach made it all about Jason. His breakdown was thus the organization’s. (For another example of this dynamic, think of Lance Armstrong and his now-diminished cancer charity Livestrong.) The super-participants, who had invested so much in the work of Invisible Children,
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The value of this participation is so great that Citizens are gaining a return on investment even before the game exists. As Star Citizen backer powertowerpro put it: “I have already got my money’s worth…I have watched 100’s of hours of video content on the making of Star Citizen. I have learned how games are made, 3D ships are built (I am a 3D modeling hobbyist), Q&A, and many other interesting things (some great fan fiction to boot!). That alone is worth my pledge.”
When these returns come together, they create what we think of as the “participation premium.”
