3. A power that organises itself beautifully

William Blake knew it 200 years ago, we are finally catching up

All the posts are part of a single series. You might want to start at the beginning.

In the last post I said we would come next to the all-important how. I’ll start with a simple outline of what I mean by gift community, but there is a bit of a leap from the ideas I’ve shared already. So I’ll then step back and start to show how we arrive at the core principles—why this particular way of doing things could lead to systemic potency.

A gift community is a network of creative and entrepreneurial people, working interdependently with each other, without any kind of coordinating corporate structure. A guiding belief is that such a network could be significantly more productive—and more profitable—than an equivalently sized company.

To move quickly through some ideas that we will come back to in greater detail: there is no imposed structure, but as unity and integration are of course still important, they come from a shared culture. Culture in turn comes from some core principles (which are very much a work-in-progress). Key to the whole thing is the gift. The word has two complementary meanings which are enshrined in the first two principles:

• Creative independence. Direction and decision making always belong to the single person who is the source of an initiative. This is about the gifts we have.

• Voluntary support with commitment. Strengths combine through voluntary support of each other’s creativity. There is no need for or place for authority, but we honour our commitments. These are the gifts we give.

• Spontaneous harmony. The unity and direction of the community emerge spontaneously, never through planning or authority. The power of the system emerges from itself.

• Trust-work. Trust is the bond that replaces dominion. It must be actively and skilfully tended to. Trust can be broken easily and unintentionally, so the work never ends. The work is mostly listening.

• Positive reciprocity. When gratitude is expressed directly as a return gift there is a cancelling out and a loss of momentum. Instead we pay it forward with a gift for someone else. Gifts never stop moving and return to us from unexpected directions, energising the whole community.

This might sound like a pleasant thing to be involved in, but does it sound like a powerhouse of profitable transformation, strong enough to out-compete enormous and inhuman corporate machines?

Only time and trying will tell, but I believe it can happen. In fact I believe those intimidating corporations are in fact inefficient lumbering dinosaurs. They will be no match for systemic potency if we can manage to activate it properly. The only way is to try, but we need at least a direction we feel confident about.

That’s why I’m writing. Not just to communicate why a particular path could be fruitful, but also to understand more clearly myself. For example, I did not expect to write about competence hierarchy in the previous post. It emerged in the process of writing. I now see it as central to the whole argument, and that in turn helps me to express the core idea much more clearly.

The vital need for hierarchy

In organisational settings, we tend to use the words power and authority interchangeably, as if holding authority over others is literally what power is. Consequently, the idea of organisational hierarchy has come to mean one thing: top-down authority. With only one kind of hierarchy, our options for innovation are limited: we could find a way to make authority hierarchy work, or we could eliminate it altogether. Historically, the make-it-work option has divided into two camps, giving us essentially three ways to coordinate, all of which lead to bad outcomes. Roughly speaking:

• Dominating individualism

• Dominating collectivism

• Flat-weak

The first two are different names for positions we are very familiar with form the political Right and Left.

The individualistic Right are more comfortable with dominion, believing that when the strong prevail over the weak the result is best for everyone thanks to nebulous ideas like the invisible hand of the marketplace. This is of course the globally dominant paradigm we are all living in which has been spectacularly successful if you squint in just the right way. With a more clear eyed view we notice that people are increasingly at each other’s throats and the world increasingly on fire.

The collectivist Left quietly agree about the benefits of dominion, but are embarrassed and disingenuous about it. They believe the chosen few can be trusted to wield power “on behalf of the people”, and incoherently try to be collectivist and centrist at the same time. In an attempt to deny that this project relies on dominion, it is hidden behind an increasingly absurd bureaucracy of committees and policies. The result can be even more machine-like and anti-life than right wing approaches, which is why it typically loses out to them in practice.

The third option comes from those who recognise that power corrupts and try to remove it completely. This gives us nominally flat organisations such as progressive, manager-free businesses or anarchist communities. But if the power-organising principle is removed, it must be replaced by another or the system will simply be weak. A pane of glass is about ten times easier to break than an upturned glass bowl. Such organisations aspire to be self-organising without noticing that it is incompatible with their goal to be flat—systems that self-organise tend to form hierarchies, as can be clearly seen in nature. Such initiatives are likely to either remain irrelevant or they morph back towards dominion. It returns in the only place it can—in the collective equivalent of Jung’s “shadow”— endless and highly toxic interpersonal power games. The more evolved examples of such organisations tackle such problem head-on, by getting better at talking through the shadow, which is highly commendable but does not address the lack of a power-organising principle. Weakness returns.

The way out, and I’m convinced it’s the only way out, starts by recognising that toxic-or-weak is a false choice because there is not one kind of power hierarchy but two: the authority hierarchy and the competence hierarchy. In other words a hierarchy of power given by decision, versus one of power that people actually have in themselves, ‘com-potency’. Our problem is that we do not know how to get one without the other.

On the contrary we think the only way to organise for competency is using dominion. Most of us would agree that if we are going to assign authority, it should go to the competent, and so we expect those holding authority to dish it out accordingly. This does not go well. The list of reasons why is long (and important!) but it boils down to a combination of personal agendas and the impossibility of even knowing in the first place who is competent with what. That second point is critical. Left leaning people tend to believe the collectivist-centralist paradox can be solved if only people were ethical enough to genuinely wield power for the collective good, but this also fails. The task is not difficult, it’s impossible. Lots more to come on this topic.

As a result of all this, the very idea of a structural competence hierarchy is met with fear and suspicion in progressive organisations. People simply cannot believe the goal is not covertly pro-dominion because they see no other possibility.

But there is one. Whereas dominion is power organised externally—from without. power can also be organised from within. This truth is all around us every day: there is incredible creative power within natural ecosystems, within certain kinds of communities, within ourselves. And if we pay close enough attention to these things we notice something that changes the whole game: power from within tends to organise itself beautifully.

No one said it better than Blake:

“Cruel Works of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.”

William Blake, Jerusalem

Paradise is wheels within wheels, revolving in freedom. But if they are free, wouldn’t the overall result be chaotic? How are they also in harmony? I think the only honest answer is we don’t really know. But we do know it happens. In nature at least there is definitely a power that tends to organise itself beautifully.

These few words capture a lot:

• This is a tendency. Give it time. Stay true. It will work out.

• This is organisation. Big power. Systemic power is individual power organised.

• It comes from itself. As individuals this power comes when our true self is unblocked. Our systems gain it when we leave them alone.

• It creates beauty. For communities this means harmony, balance, peace, wellbeing.

From the perspective of human organisations, the idea that system structure could work out for the best by doing nothing at all might seem highly fanciful. But this is not romantic wishful thinking. Far from it, it is dispassionate observation.

Bring African and European musical traditions together in New Orleans, wait a decade or two, get jazz; no plan required. Mix great artists and philosophers together with plenty of political freedom in 15th century Florence, get the Renaissance; no plan required. In cities and villages alike, the most loved places tend to be the ones where a certain liveliness has played out over long years without interference.

And why not? After all, the entire universe operates like this. Bring enough matter and energy together to create a very big bang, wait about 14 billion years, get flying squirrels. Some see God in this, some don’t. Everyone sees the squirrels.

I’m not suggesting just doing nothing will automatically lead to a good outcome. If that were the case we wouldn’t have a climate crisis and all the rest in the first place. What I am suggesting is that the problems come from the dominion. If we could get rid of that while being open to spontaneous self-organisation, I believe things will work out very well.

In particular I believe we will see strong competence hierarchies emerging of their own accord. In my experience people like competence hierarchy as long as it’s genuine and not a facade over dominion. We like to see skilled people doing well, we like to defer to them and learn from them, we have a natural respect for the accomplished when they don’t use it as a club to beat us with.

So here is our goal: self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion. The five principles we started with are designed to take us in that direction. To understand how, we will first need to look at three important observations:

• Culture is better than rules

• Desire is better than obligation

• We can find only two sources of potency

We will look closer next post!

🐘