Naming the Power at the Decision-Making Table
My name is Beth Glick. I am a cisgender, middle-aged, American/Canadian Jewish woman, writing this blog post on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Just a year ago, an introduction like this was not a mainstream practice in my circles. In the past months, I am finding it is more and more common for people to self-identify in group spaces.
Self-identification (not just as a greeting practice, but also a subject to be explored within groups) allows people to show up as their full-er selves. It shines a light on distinct context or perspective, elevates uniqueness and commonalities, and defines sources of power and privilege. It creates the ground for talking about what is unsaid or assumptive about who we are. Taken more seriously, grappling publicly with identity can be a first step towards unearthing and deconstructing unconscious biases and inequities that manifest in group structures and institutions.
As our learning this week focused on decision-making, I think about the practices we experimented with — advice process, consent-based, generative decision-making. Each built for different purposes, there is deep wisdom that lies at the heart of these practices. Clear frameworks to mitigate the potential for ambiguity, malintent, or misunderstanding. A design that mandates everyone in the decision-making room to voice an opinion, mitigating the festering of the unsaid or the harboured. The precise identification of each person’s roles within a particular decision.
In our first session, Susan Basterfield insightfully explained that many self-management practices are rooted in the idea of making the implicit explicit. How does implicit power show up in these decision-making practices? What can we do within these practices to name the different forms of power that lie in a room? This may be the power of authority. This may be the power of expertise. This may be power of pedigree. This may be the power of charisma. This may be identity-based power drawn from societal hierarchies. Some power — like the power of expertise — can be vital to certain decisions. Other power — like power emboldened by white supremacy culture — can be detrimental to decisions, and ultimately, the organization itself.
Extending this lesson more generally, I wonder where unspoken societal power and its manifestations show up in distributed or self-managed systems. This is a time when people are awakening to the importance of acknowledging identity, especially the identity that historically has been most unacknowledged in much of the West: whiteness and its manifestation of white supremacist culture. Given this backdrop, what is our responsibility to explore how identity and power manifest in self-managed organizations? What I do sense is that we cannot assume that its decision-making practices innately ‘right’ themselves or magically extract societal bias from their scaffolding.
Whiteness is an implicit identity that we need to make explicit in conversations about self-managing organizations. Many of the self-management ambassadors I have encountered are white. Why is this the case? What is built into the assumptions about self-managing organizations that are attracting whiteness? What implicit bias is there — in the design, in what it is discussed, in what it is not discussed — that this community might be missing? Where is white supremacy culture showing up across the design principles of self-managing systems? In the spirit of making the implicit explicit, I am eager to explore how asking these questions can guide us towards organizational practices that work — and are championed — across a broader range of identities.
Part 2 of a series of reflections during my participation in the Practical Self-Management Intensive with Better Work Together.
