THE IDEA
The rules aren’t neutral
Every system has rules. Who can access what resources. How decisions get made. What gets measured and rewarded. How information flows. These rules look technical, neutral, administrative. They’re not. They’re power, embedded in structure.
Power in systems isn’t primarily about individuals being powerful. It’s about how the system’s structure advantages some actors and disadvantages others - often invisibly, often without anyone deliberately choosing to create the advantage. The person who sets the meeting agenda has power over what gets discussed. The team that controls the budget has power over what gets done. The metric that defines success has power over what people prioritise. None of these look like “power” in the dramatic sense. All of them shape outcomes profoundly.
The deepest form of systemic power is the power to define the system itself - to set its goals, draw its boundaries, write its rules, and determine what counts as success. This power is often concentrated in the hands of people who don’t think of themselves as powerful. They think they’re just doing their job, just designing the process, just setting the strategy. But in a system, designing the structure IS exercising power, whether you intend it or not.
IN PRACTICE
The structure that speaks louder than anyone in it
A company says it values innovation. But the budget process requires three levels of approval for any new initiative, the performance review rewards consistent delivery over experimentation, and the meeting schedule leaves no unstructured time. Nobody decided to suppress innovation. The structure does it automatically. The power isn’t held by any individual who’s anti-innovation. It’s held by the structures that make innovation costly and risky for anyone who tries.
An education system says every child has equal opportunity. But school funding is tied to local property values, so wealthy areas have better-resourced schools. Testing determines access to higher education, but test preparation is available to those who can pay. The curriculum reflects the culture and experience of the dominant group. Nobody wakes up deciding to create inequality. The structure produces it - reliably, efficiently, and invisibly.
A family says everyone’s voice matters equally. But the parent who controls the finances has de facto veto power. The person who does the emotional labour of planning and organising shapes every decision by what they put on the agenda and what they don’t. The child who’s most articulate gets heard more than the one who communicates differently. The stated value is equality. The structure produces hierarchy.
WORKING WITH THIS
Seeing the power in the plumbing
To see power in a system, stop looking at people and start looking at structures. Ask: who sets the rules? Who controls the resources? Who defines what success looks like? Who decides what gets measured? Whose perspective is built into the default settings? The answers reveal where power actually sits - which is often different from the org chart or the stated values.
When you want to change power dynamics, changing the people is usually insufficient. If the structure remains the same, the new people will behave like the old ones - because the structure rewards the same behaviours regardless of who’s in the role. Changing power means changing structures: who has access to information, how decisions are made, what gets measured, how resources are allocated.
The hardest part is that the people who benefit from the current power structure often can’t see it. Power that works through structure is invisible to those it serves, precisely because it works automatically. They don’t experience it as power. They experience it as “the way things work.” Naming structural power isn’t an accusation. It’s a diagnosis. The structure isn’t someone’s fault. But it is someone’s responsibility to change - and usually that someone is the person with enough power to see the structure and enough integrity to question it.
THE INSIGHT
The line to remember
The most powerful force in any system isn’t the people at the top. It’s the structure that put them there - and keeps putting people like them there, regardless of who they are.
RECOGNITION
When this is in play
You’re seeing power in systems when the same types of people keep ending up in the same positions, regardless of stated commitments to change. When a system produces unequal outcomes reliably, without anyone intending it. When someone says “that’s just how things work” about an arrangement that clearly benefits some over others. When the conversation about a problem keeps focusing on individual behaviour when the structure is producing the behaviour. When the person who designed the process doesn’t think of themselves as having power - that invisibility IS the power.