Systems change work tends to attract people who care deeply about justice, sustainability, and transformation. We’re motivated by powerful visions of what could be different and often righteously impatient about the need for change. This moral clarity is essential—it fuels the long, difficult work of challenging entrenched patterns and power structures.
But moral clarity can also make us vulnerable to overcorrection. When we identify something that needs to change, we often swing hard in the opposite direction, embracing new articles of faith with the same certainty we’re rejecting in the old ones. Essential truths become romanticized as the whole truth. We trade one set of simplifications for another, just another that might feel more morally righteous.
This series examines five notions that can function as articles of faith in systems change work:
“It’s all about power.”
Each represents an important correction to historical patterns of harm. Each is also prone to overcorrections that can limit our effectiveness. The challenge is to hold on to the correction but hold them with more nuance—to recognize when a needed correction has swung too far and what practices might help us find balance.
2. “It’s all about power.”
Why a power lens is critically important
A power lens is an essential correction to analyses that ignore or minimize its core role in shaping systems and keeping harmful systems locked in place. For too long, systems change work has treated problems as merely technical when they are powerfully political. We’ve optimized system functioning while leaving underlying structures of power, privilege, and oppression intact. We’ve talked about “stakeholders” as if everyone had an equal stake, ignoring vast differences in who benefits from current arrangements and who bears their costs.
Foregrounding power helps us reveal what is covered up and name what is undiscussable. It names the elephant in the room. It refuses false neutrality and false equivalencies that perpetuate harm.
The power lens has been crucial for honestly understanding how and why systems work the way they do—in ways that no other lens can. Take, for example, the lack of meaningful action on climate change. A power lens reveals deeper truths about why, despite knowing about climate change for 50-plus years, we’ve made so little progress: fossil fuel companies haven’t just lobbied against regulation, they’ve funded doubt, captured regulatory agencies, and reinforced such deep economic dependencies—through jobs, tax revenue, and campaign contributions—that politicians face real electoral consequences for challenging the industry. It’s not a knowledge problem or a technology problem; it’s about who has had the power to set the terms of debate and block alternatives.
The risks of overcorrection
During a 2019 Systems Transformation Learning Journey with 30 leaders in philanthropy, my colleague Luzette Jaimes and I invited the participants to experience the power of a system lens. We gave each person a pair of red glasses and a card with a hidden message on it. When they put on the glasses, much the printed noise in other colors disappeared, and a hidden message was revealed (spoiler alert: the message was “Seeing into Systems”).
When we asked about the implications of this, it was obvious to everyone how lenses help us see aspects of systems that are normally invisible, or at least difficult to perceive. Then someone noted that these aspects are only hidden to those of us who haven’t been wearing those lenses their whole lives. What no one noted was another truth: that the lens not only revealed, it also hid. To reveal the hidden message, the red glasses had erased a lot of other information in the image, blinding us to other possibly important data in that picture. (Cool idea for the future: Hide an additional message that can only be revealed with blue glasses :)
An overcorrection treats power as not just a necessary but, too often, as a sufficient explanation for how systems behave over time. This monocausal framing can flatten the actual complexity of how and why systems reproduce themselves—and, importantly, what motivates people to maintain or disrupt them. It becomes a seductive analytical shortcut that feels morally righteous (especially to those of us who don’t feel so powerful) but may limit our understanding of other high-leverage mechanisms, dynamics, and pathways.
This monocausal framing can flatten the actual complexity of how and why systems reproduce themselves—and, importantly, what motivates people to maintain or disrupt them.
The overcorrection can also become strangely disempowering. The moment we assign power to others, we often implicitly give away part of our own agency. After all, if “they” have all the power and “they” are calling the shots, what’s left for “us” to do except to react rather than proact by, for example, demanding that they use their power differently?
“It’s all about power” can also shut down rather than open up conversation. It can become the analysis, the intervention, and the justification all at once, precluding the harder work of understanding how specific systems maintain themselves and where genuine leverage might exist.
Finally, and importantly, any single lens, overused, can become dehumanizing. When we reduce others to merely actors in a power dynamic, for example, we can lose sight of the whole, complex human beings who are in the system with us, which is often where the openings lie. Where we see people grasping to hold onto power, another lens might reveal a person holding fear of failure, personal trauma leading them to take on the hero role in a Drama Triangle, or feeling seemingly existential threats to their status, certainty, or even their identity. These other lenses aren’t mutually exclusive with the power lens—they are more true together, and, together, they suggest a more whole approach.
And the impact isn’t only on others. As author Ursula K. Le Guin put it in 1975,
“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.”
Bringing balance
Balance means holding power as a crucial dimension of analysis without treating it as the only dimension needed to understand both a system and the human experiences within that system. We can name power dynamics clearly while also attending to mental models, mindsets of either-or thinking and scarcity, structural incentives and disincentives, the dynamics of fear and threat, the flow of signals and the shifting of boundaries, and emergent properties of complex systems (see 8 Lenses for Systemic Analysis for a range of lenses, each of which provides a distinct view on a system).
We can speak truth to power while building relationships with—and, I’ll say it, even have empathy for—people who hold power. We can challenge systems of oppression while seeing the people embedded in them as complex, often conflicted, and, most importantly, maybe even open to change.
Balance means asking: What does a power analysis reveal here? And what does it obscure? What other lenses help us understand this system’s behavior? Where does power intersect with other dynamics? What becomes possible when we hold multiple frameworks simultaneously?
Coming next: Part 3. “Self-organization just happens.”
Russ Gaskin is founder and co-owner of CoCreative, a consulting and training organization specializing in network weaving, systems change strategy co-design, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder collaborations.
Learn about CoCreative’s coaching support for leaders, funders, and facilitators of collaborative systems change.