The Insulation of Power
In electrical systems, the insulation of power refers to the use of heat resistant materials to prevent harmful leakage of electrical current and minimize the risks of electrical shocks or fires. On January 7th, I had to evacuate my home as a result of the Eaton fire. I watched as the lack of insulation burned a community I loved to the ground. I was lucky, my home was 2 miles away from the fire perimeter but even so, I was out of my house for 8 weeks as we sorted through the smoke damage and ash. Reports following the fire indicate how one part of the neighborhood got the LA County warning while across the street people lost their lives as a result of not getting ANY warning until the fires were ripping through their homes. The irony that I’ve spent the last 5 years thinking of the insulation of power at the top of our institutions was not lost on me.
There has been a fire burning through our institutions, it has been small embers, but as January 20th came and went - those embers have become raging fires. Our early warning systems never reach the people who most need the information to take actions to save their own lives and protect loved ones. The people with the most access to power (in this case information) insulate themselves from the risks of shock while leaving people with much less access to power (and in this case, information) fully exposed to all of the harmful effects of unexpected shocks in our system.
In our systems, all of our systems, we tend to insulate power at the top and distribute risk to the bottom. We have at-will employment that makes sure institutions can get rid of people the very moment they want - without any obligation to the economic turmoil we are about to create for an employee. We have 100 different kinds of performance systems for the people we manage and drastically few and very ineffective options for getting feedback to managers. There are several moral, ethical, and spiritual reasons why I think that is unacceptable. It is also a way in which our decisions become detached from the reality of the people inside of an organization. We created Brava primarily because as I watched multiracial and multicultural organizations, one I ran included, take best practices offered from Society of Human Resource Management, Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation review - their organization would blow up. Our teams feel that dynamic and will not allow it. This is why the explosion.
These blowups often result in us vs them dynamic and we often miss what we are losing out on because of the very insulation our systems promote. There are three lessons I think we should be learning right now:
One: We cannot mistake the use of power with the abuse of power. We often delay making decisions, shaping information, and communicating hard tradeoffs because we feel bad for the power we have instead of owning that power. Our lack of a power analysis drives us to delay hard decisions and sign off on them the way the little mermaid signs her voice away to Ursula - looking away from the scroll and in a flurry. We keep putting our own power on a high interest credit card accruing cultural, programmatic, or financial debt because we feel almost sinful about the power we do have. That feeling is about our relationship to power, not about whether or not the decisions we are making are just.
Two: Then the question presents itself - how do we know if what we are doing is right or just? For most decisions it is pretty clear and those decisions do go fast. But we make plenty of tradeoffs where the answers are not clear. I think the next four years, at least, will be filled with those painful unclear tradeoffs. At best with these decisions we are placing bets. We have to be honest about the bet we are placing and what we hope the impact of the bet might be. This would absolutely require us to open up what leads us to placing the bet and the context that formed the decision - which is about accountability to our decision making. That accountability and transparency connects us with our teams. It builds actual relationships where people can engage with decision making/power instead of treating it like an edict from a parent where the engagement is always deference.
Three: We must keep perspective on our actual vs perceived risks at any given moment. This can be incredibly hard, especially in a time when risk has proliferated exponentially for some of us from one day to the next, in our own country. For quite some time now, I've used the diagram below to understand the spectrum at which I think people experience safety and power. Often when we make decisions and tradeoffs, our calculus can be ourselves and our own experience of impact. Even when we're thinking of our institutions, it is who and what we personally think is consequential/inconsequential to our institution. On this chart you see a relationship between access to resources and experience of risk.
Levers of Safety
Survival and Treading Water on this chart are the lowest bands of safety and power. Typically the folks here are poor and working class. These folks are often invisible. In these levels of power and safety - folks experience real physical and personal risk at every single intersection. Even getting help to have more power and be safe requires risk. If you have ever been a person or known a person in Survival and Treading Water stages, you know there is not much space to reflect on emotional and social safety. The goal is to stay physically afloat.
Risks come down quite a bit when we are in safety and comfort. These are typically middle income people whose wages cover their living cost. We experience smaller threats in bigger ways in these bands. I call this threat calcification. We imagine a dramatic employee will end the institution, we fear paying out any salary at the end of an employment relationship may lead to future destruction, or that complaints will mean the loss of your team. It does not mean these threats aren’t real, they can be, but the strength of our reactions can be disproportionate. For those of us with experience in Survival and Treading Water - the fear of going back there can be tremendous. Some of us are just habituated to a lack of risk or deference, so any risk can be very dysregulating. We have to be mindful of the overreach of our power so our decision making doesn’t prioritize insulating ourselves over supporting people who are being not just hurt but harmed. When we make choices that say - my nervous system regulation is more important than your physical and economic security - we position our experience as one deserving of more dignity than the people who experience deeper risk.
At luxury, any inconvenience starts to present as a risk to your power when in reality - you have so much power that it is not an actual risk. That doesn’t mean decisions don’t matter - they do - but perspective is paramount. Luxury is a stage attained by few people/institutions and the blast radius of the decisions of those people/institutions can be huge because of their obscene amount of power. If no resource is inaccessible to you and all your wealth covers the risks you may be experiencing - your point of view on what “safe” is can be strongly and permanently skewed.
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As we move through the next 4 years, we will be faced with lots of choices. And if we don’t keep perspective the pain which operates as an early warning system will be missed if we don’t stop insulating the most powerful in our institutions. We will not see the learning latent in our disagreements because we punish conflict for existing. We will not see the weaknesses in our systems because we ignore the less seasoned person complaining about them and label the person a problem rather than listening more deeply to understand their perspective. We will not see the danger of losing our rights because the people first being stripped of that right are more vulnerable.
So I’m asking you to stop yourselves and ask yourselves, where are you insulating yourself from your team and what are they trying to teach you? Why does it hurt? What can we learn from your hurt and theirs?
