Structure Without Hierarchy: Effective Leadership in Social Change Movements

Radically horizontal structures put a check on leaders’ authority—but at what cost? Here, protesters at Occupy Sydney in 2011 take part in a consensus-building exercise.

Creative Commons/Kate Ausburn

Occupy san francisco is meeting in Justin Herman Plaza. The group is engaged in another long and painful consensus meeting, made more painful by a lack of skills on the part of our brave but inexperienced facilitators. I raise my hand and make a suggestion.

“Maybe instead of all of us trying to order the agenda, the facilitators could just take a few minutes and do that for us.”

Behind me, a young man so agitated that he appears to be jumping out of his skin turns and glares at me.

“I haven’t seen you here in the camp before! I don’t see you here at night! Why should we listen to you?” he shouts.

I bite back the retort, “Oh yeah? I haven’t seen you in the forty years I’ve been organizing in this town!”

It wouldn’t do any good. The meeting limps on in its painful way, so embroiled in ineffective process that nothing of substance gets decided, and I stand there more and more frustrated — not least because for many of those forty or more years, I have worked in groups that also defined themselves as horizontal and egalitarian yet were able to organize efficiently and create empowering experiences for their members.

And so I eagerly read both Miki Kashtan’s new book, Reweaving Our Human Fabric, and the commentary on leadership it elicited from Charles Eisenstein in this issue of Tikkun. Issues of power, leadership, and group conflict have been key interests of mine for decades, so I’m delighted to offer my own response to the ideas raised by both Kashtan and Eisenstein.

Since the early days of the second wave of feminism back in the ’70s, I’ve been involved in groups that consciously defined themselves as “nonhierarchical” and have often been in the uncomfortable position of serving in leadership roles in nominally “leaderless” groups. I’ve seen many groups undergo intense struggles, and I’ve also been part of large-scale mobilizations that organized quite effectively without central control.

What makes the difference? While there are thousands of books and trainings and MBA programs that will teach you to manage a hierarchy, there are few models and little theory about how to nonmanage a nonhierarchy. And yet the issue is crucial. The simple problem of how to get along in groups is probably the most constraining factor in challenging the overarching structures of oppressive power. Struggling with these issues led me to write Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery back in the ’80s, and more recently, The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups.

Understanding Social Power

Kashtan differentiates between “power- over” and “power-with.” But to work both collaboratively and effectively, we need an even more nuanced understanding of power, for the word can mean many different things. Power- over is something we are all familiar with: the ability of one person or a group to control resources, set standards, use force, or impose punishment on others.

Power- from- within is the term I prefer for that sense of power that means ability, skill, confidence, and proficiency; our creative and spiritual power; or our courage to take risks or to speak truth. Empowerment is another term we might use, and one goal of our egalitarian groups might be to empower one another: to help each member feel a greater sense of agency and potentiality, and gain skills, confidence, and courage.

But there is a third type of power that arises in groups, however they are structured. Social power is the level of influence and respect a person holds, apart from whatever structural power the person may have. Understanding social power is crucial to addressing complex questions of inclusion, equality, and effectiveness.

For social power itself comes in two basic flavors: earned and unearned. Unearned social power — the respect automatically accorded to someone because of...