(em)Power

There have been times, I confess, when I vainly feared that I was the only person who saw it - the misunderstanding, misappropriation and misapplication of power - but then reassurance and a vestigial hope has been granted by such as a letter to a popular magazine or a posting on a blog.

In Back Chat (Good Weekend letters to the editor, 27 October 2018), Jane Hosking of Tinonee, NSW wrote:

'Someone has finally called out what I call the "MBA curse"… the main problem in the working world today. People are employed solely because they have management training, based on an erroneous belief that if you are a trained manager, you can manage anything.'

Whilst on avc.com (13 February 2012), a guest post by well-known 'tech' blogger Joel Spolsky (edited for some brevity) observed:

'Most management is of the “command and control” variety. The CEO makes a decision, and tells his lieutenants. They convey this important decision to the teams, who execute on the CEO’s decision. It’s top-down management. All authority and power and decisions flow from the top. How could it work any other way? Turns out, it’s positively de-motivating to work for a company where your job is just to shut up and take orders. Thus, the upside-down pyramid. Stop thinking of the management team at the top of the organization. The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.

Administrators aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions. You don’t build a [business] with one big gigantic brain on the top, and a bunch of lesser brains obeying orders down below. You try to get everyone to have a gigantic brain in their area, and you provide a minimum amount of administrative support to keep them humming along. Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain - the CEO’s.

It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just hire smart people and give them real authority. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done - and then getting the hell out of the way.'

What's most strange about both the above quoted 'revelations' is that we see them as such - new insights upon perplexing dilemmas - when in truth the knowledge has been with us for centuries if we only looked. Dreams of singular glory have repeatedly blinded many among us to the wisdom of our forebears.

From the east, verse sixty-six of the Tao Te Ching (trans. Jonathan Star), the foundation text of Daoist philosophy reads:

'Why do the hundred rivers

turn and rush toward the sea?

Because it naturally stays below them

He who wishes to rule over the people

must speak as if below them

He who wishes to lead the people

must walk as if behind them

So the Sage rules over the people

but he does not weigh them down

He leads the people

but does not block their way

The Sage stays low

so the world never tires of exalting him

He remains a servant

so the world never tires of making him its king'

And from the west, among the opening stanzas of Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney), one of the foundation works of poetry in English, we find:

'Beow's name was known through the north.

And a young prince must be prudent like that,

giving freely while his father lives

so that afterwards in age when fighting starts

steadfast companions will stand by him

and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired

is the path to power among people everywhere.'

Age-old advice indeed, yet here I am, certainly with no delusions of new-found wisdom or claims of original insight but none-the-less a sense of obligation, to raise popular awareness once more to the truth as to wherein our power actually lies.

Because in reality, as all these examples illuminate, if anything has more potential than power it is empowerment. Power over others requires the investment of energy to protect that power, however the empowering of others creates a unified body of equally enabled contributors who in combination have a strength far greater than any individual and which is not threatened by usurpation - all its energy investment is productive and not wasted upon protective measures.

But we're never going to see broadscale realisation of this simple truth, or better still, action to adopt its message as a standard modus, unless we start to teach it to our young from the earliest possible opportunity. As we all know, there is no better lesson than actual practice. It is pointless within an MBA course to preach bottom-up management within a top-down educational model. And tertiary level institutions are way too late to be commencing such an endeavour anyway. This is an undertaking that needs to be addressed from the first day of schooling.

However our current education model was 'Designed during the Industrial Revolution', as has been frequently observed in the past and restated most recently in Sharon Bradley's article Lessons in Learning (Good Weekend, 3 November 2018), 'It smacks of factory-process management: ringing bells tell students when to clock on and off and mark the times at which they must move from one stage of their manufacture to the next - 45 minutes of Algebra 1 in this room, 45 minutes of William Blake in that one; the periodic table over here; logarithms over there. Even the batch size, the class itself is determined not by the most obvious thing that a group of students might have in common, their ability, but by their own dates of manufacture - their birthdays … After 13 years of formal education, the batch has reached the end of the assembly line and, regardless of whether it has been well fabricated or not, is despatched into the outside world.'

Little wonder then that 'Australia's academic performance has gone into sharp decline.' She adds, 'Disengagement lies at the heart of the rot' with students who 'feel like a cog in a machine' reporting 'a poor sense of autonomy'. This is most certainly not empowerment. This is not how best we can prepare our young to be engaged and enthusiastic contributors to, and members of, a dynamic, supportive and genuinely powerful and empowered society and culture.

Thankfully, moves are afoot to at least attempt the beginnings of change within our schools but change of this sort, within a bureaucracy of such scale, is notoriously glacial. This is not however a task which should be left to our schools alone. This is a global challenge - but which can and should be tackled at every scale and at every opportunity. It is the undertaking for which the phrase 'think global, act local' may best have been coined.

Throughout history, the most powerful developments in human achievement and potential have been those that empowered the most people. Power over others, conquest, has consistently resulted in conflict; Empowering of others repeatedly engenders progress, leading to prosperity. If we don't, as a species, learn and learn quickly to work collaboratively and cooperatively - a globally unified and empowered force seeking betterment for all - we are doomed through our own vainglorious pursuits and deliberate ignorance to languish and flounder, taking down with us a broad diversity of dynamic environments and a veritable wealth of living species alongside whom we evolved over millennia past.

We need to decide now whether what we truly desire is the emptiness of power or the extraordinary richness of empowerment because, as Yuval Noah Harari concludes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 'We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles - but nobody knows where we're going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with that all power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are constantly wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?'

Submission for New Philosopher Writers' Award XXI: Power