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by Jeanne Bell, Co-Founder
Image: MARIANA JUAREZ, artist, San Miguel de Allende, MX [Instagram, Website]
Blog No. 3 - May 2023
Strategy and power are deeply and inextricably linked in justice-committed organizations. When it’s beautiful, this looks like people using their power consciously and effectively to advance bold strategies together. When it’s not so beautiful, it looks like conflict. Conflict over which strategies, created by whom, and interpreted in which ways.
The people in an organization who answer, “I do,” to the questions posed above have more power than the people who answer, “not me.” In other words, strategic agency is at the very core of organizational power.
What’s tricky about this is that very few organizations have explicit answers, by name and title, to the questions on the right side of my chart. People in positional power very often grant strategic agency to others based upon their social and intellectual capital rather than through job descriptions or well-structured decision-making processes. Moreover, executives who are not self-aware, or who are excessively controlling, may grant strategic agency only to people who think like them, or only in situations they feel they can steer towards their desired outcome.
It’s no wonder that this causes conflict. If only one or two people have any strategic agency, then that is experienced by the staff as a clear hoarding of power. If it's opaque and situational as to when additional people have strategic agency, those who don’t have it wonder, “Why them and not me? Why in this case but not that one? How is real power acquired here?”
Invaluable recent writings by Maurice Mitchell and Rebecca Epstein and Mistiguette Smith explore the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to exceptionally high levels of conflict in justice-committed organizations right now. Unsurprisingly, issues of strategy are integral to both.
Throughout Mitchell's piece, we hear an unequivocal call to strategic rigor. To strategy as what must ultimately align and drive organizations towards impact. Here are select strategy passages from Building Resilient Organizations:
“To be clear, personal identity and individual experience are important. And while it is true that the “personal is political,” the personal cannot trump strategy nor should it overwhelm the collective interest. Identity is too broad a container to predict one’s politics or the validity of a particular position.”
“Our organizations and movements need to grow. Holding on to tactics and overly idealistic demands that keep us small but pure ignores the basic strategic imperative of building power.”
“Leaders should ensure that the organizational strategy is clear and understood across the board. Invest in training all stakeholders on how the strategy was developed, what hypotheses are operating underneath the strategy, and how to measure the strategy's effectiveness.”
“The organization and its senior leaders should invest serious time in presenting the full and complex strategic landscape to more junior, less experienced, and newer people.”
In Epstein and Smith’s piece, we hear a causal relationship between strategic misalignment and what they term the “cycle of disconnection.” Here are select strategy passages from Paving A Better Way: What’s Driving Progressive Organizations Apart and How to Win by Coming Together:
“All too often, the unique context, political identity, and purpose of our organizations blur with the passage of time—or maybe they were never clarified. The trend of shorter job tenures means that fewer people in organizations are likely to have a historical perspective about where their organization is situated in a larger movement ecosystem, what it was founded to do, and how and why it carries that work out.”
“When leaders are not explicit about what underlies and informs the organization’s work, individuals understandably project their own beliefs or assumptions onto that organization. When staff enter an organization with assumptions that do not align with the reality of the organization’s work, the cycle of disconnection gets revved up, often leading to destructive outcomes for staff, leaders, organizations, and movements themselves. Making the implicit explicit here is an essential step in breaking that cycle.”
As these authors make clear, our work as leaders is to continuously engage our staff and stakeholders in the why and how and to what end of the work we do to advance justice. Both of these seminal pieces guide leaders to recognize that conflict will always persist where strategy is opaque and when the agency to activate strategy rests in the hands of only a few.
Questions for discussion:
- When we look at recurring conflict in our organization right now, is it in part conflict over who has strategic agency and how that agency is expressed?
- Can we be more honest with ourselves about who at our organization actually creates strategy, who vets it, and who activates it through organizationally-critical decision-making?
- Would our more junior and newer staff say that we are doing a good job of orienting them to “the unique context, political identity, and purpose” of our organization?
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