What Cards can I Play? Power and Privilege in System Design
Words by SDXer Cheryl Whitelaw
In SDX18: Power Play we explored the linkages we make in our identity, our sense of self with how our identity is socially located, our identity in context, in community, and in networks. So often in my experience of social and systemic design we focus on changing the system — changing the culture and the context in which the system operates. I find this focus can create a blind spot: we don’t notice who has the power and, if it is me, I may not notice how other people’s experiences in the systemic design process is not like mine.
In SDX18 we opened up that blind spot to explore what was in it: issues of “the 2 P’s” — power and privilege.
Like any blind spot, power and privilege tend to be under-examined by people who have them and more clearly seen by people who do not. Using the metaphor of a fish swimming in water, a privileged, powerful fish does not see the quality of the water, the size of the tank that surrounds them, and might not see who is displaced by their wake. The fish in cloudy water, in a small tank, or even gasping outside of the glass is acutely aware of what they don’t have. This fish may be used to swimming with wary awareness of bigger fish or having the responsibility of finding ways to co-exist in the proximity of the more powerful fish.
What makes one person a powerful influencer of a system at the point of design or in shaping its operations and another person less so?
I sometimes hear power equated as competence — i.e., an underlying belief that, if I am competent enough I will have the power to make the change I want. I believe that this kind of underlying belief is founded on some experience of power and privilege. In Canada, the moral imperative to attend to the 2 Ps in social and systems design tends to be based on values of fairness, justice, doing what is right, inclusion, and a sense of contributing to some social or public good. This vision of inclusive system design comes from the best of us — that, yes, we can design a better society. I resonate with that and more.
What are we talking about when we talk about power? Within the frame of systemic design, a definition offered at the Power Play event is: power is the ability to affect an outcome. This definition speaks to the interdependent relationship of the agent, the person with power to create conditions, to change the system, the context, the people involved in a way that aligns with a desired outcome. We tend to equate power with assumptions, our personal implicit biases about power. Playing with the verb in this sentence raised some different reactions in me:
- Power is the ability to decide an outcome.
- Power is the ability to create an outcome.
- Power is the ability to mandate an outcome.
What does power mean to you? How do you understand the power you hold? The privilege you can access?
I have particular interest in the role of people as agents within a system and in the intersection of people’s influences as users, operators, and designers of systems. I have most often explored this intersection through evaluation and applied research in innovations of educational systems. As an evaluator, I became interested in social and systemic design because of the lessons learned from asking evaluation questions like, “how did [the innovation in the system] affect your ability to [perform outcome supported by the system
My interest in power is rooted in two main practice domains — leadership coaching and Aikido.
Aikido is a Japanese martial art that focuses on receiving power and re-directing it towards another kind of outcome, one potentially more harmonious than the initial attack might suggest. What does Aikido have to do with systemic design? One way to understand Aikido is to understand it as a system of practice that manages and directs power.
Aikido is a brilliant practice field to understand how I approach the exercise of power and how I understand my sense of power or powerlessness in a situation or context. Newcomers to aikido tend to bring unexamined ideas about power, as we size up our opponent. For example:
- Power = strength. I rely on strength as a primary tool of power. I may use my strength in all situations, even when it is not functional. If I do not have strength, I may have discomfort in exercising the power I have, giving up as soon as I meet any resistance.
- Power = weakness. If I am weaker than my partner, I am less powerful and at risk of being subject to their power.
It can be a disruptive, uncomfortable experience to question our own sense of power, and even more so to question how we wield it (or don’t). In one activity during SDX18, we paired up and physically leaned on each other. My partner and I were comfortably leaning into each other and then we started to play, pushing a little and yielding and pushing back. At one point my partner leaned harder into me — to keep my own balance, I had to anchor into my feet and legs. After, my partner spoke to her discomfort with pushing on me in that way.
We often can’t see when we can hold power and when we have used it, especially if our personal narrative includes a story line of our own powerlessness or discomfort. One sweet spot for reflection and kind attention on my personal relationship with power — to get curious about what power I have (and whether I choose to use it or not) — is at the moments when I tell myself a story about how I don’t have much power. When my story and feeling about powerlessness is primary, I can tend to dismiss the power I can bring to the situation.
In Aikido, beginners engage in developmental training to learn about and learn how to use tools of the system to receive and direct power. They learn about how to optimally position themselves, the leverage points of the body’s mechanics, and how to move someone without requiring matching strength. They learn about working from upright and dignified alignment, an organization of the body that creates structural strength. They learn, working with partners who create a supportive connection in the system of the interaction, to maintain their own position, alignment and structure, and to take that structure into action. Sparring partners provide supportive challenges once they are more adept, more comfortable engaging the system of power within themselves to test, in the safety of the training room, how to bring their personal system of power into an interaction with others.
We can’t use what we don’t cultivate. WWe can’t learn about power — mine, yours, and ours — without attending to it. I find that a system designed with attention to power and privilege is more functional — these influences on the system are more visible and can be addressed and used as tangible engines and assets to feed the system and the processes surrounding it.
Integrating awareness of power and privilege into social and systems design requires both a pro-active process planning piece and a live awareness of how power and privilege are playing in the room. This takes practice, to notice my own powers and privileges, to see during or after the fact how these dynamics played out and to work with people in committed practice to try, learn, and improve. What seems impossible becomes difficult but possible, then easy, then even elegant.
In Aikido, the system is kicked off when one person launches an attack. The second person organizes themselves to receive the attack, usually in a way that disrupts the organization of the attacking person. For example, a linear, direct punch may be met by an expanding circular movement originating at an angle to the line of attack. Opposing the punch directly becomes a power contest; influencing the direct attack by an expanding centrifugal movement changes the direction of the attack and uproots it from the source of its power.
While worthwhile and important, in systemic design it can be easy to focus on the historic and systemic ways that people have been marginalized and excluded from access to power within systems and contexts without turning the systemic mirror towards oneself.
In my experience, owning one’s own power takes practice, self-reflection, and more practice. In involves asking myself how I can be kind and bring balance to an asymmetrical relationship or situation when I exercise my power. As in Aikido, what intrigues me is how to bring the intention to support each person to access their own power into the foreground of a systemic design process.
How might we create processes and practices that enable each person’s identity and sense of self to come forward — to create space for people to recognize and stand in their own power?
For me, keeping a systems-level view misses the more intimate, potentially transformative space of how someone can shift from a personal sense of powerlessness to a personal sense of power. The interplay of perceived and experienced personal power with the opportunities and constraints in a system or a system design process is where we need to check — how is the power play working? How do participants in a systemic design process perceive the power they have? How comfortable are they to exercise it?
Personally and morally satisfying for me is the practice of exercising power with others, rather than over others. In Aikido there is a moral imperative when responding to an attack to de-escalate — to open up space in a fairly closed, tight system for other options to occur. It requires the person receiving the attack to have a clear sense of the ground beneath them, with the ability to recruit and mobilize themselves in appropriate ways.
Perfect is the enemy of the good in this practice. As designers and facilitators, we must make space for compassion for those who have legacies of historic dis-empowerment. We must also make space for compassion for those wanting to learn to work in inclusive and expansive power-sharing processes, to pursue practices of balancing power asymmetry together. We owe it to each other and to ourselves in our dream of designing a better world.
Cheryl Whitelaw is owner of Kind Power Coaching and Consulting. She is an SDXer because she values the opportunity to connect with people interested in finding visionary, practical ways to solutions in our world. Connect with Cheryl on Twitter at @WhitelawCheryl or via email at cheryl@kindpower.ca.
Postscript: here are some questions offered by the leads at SDX18 to help you reflect on your own power and privilege.
