(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

I have been thinking and mulling over the things that I'm going to talk to you about for quite some time. I think that the best way for me to start is to give you a little bit of how I personally got here, because I think that my story is a part of how I was able to access a lot of the language around power, because I didn't grow up really having much of it. I grew up in a low-income community here in Southern California. I live in Los Angeles right now, and my mom is from Mexico. My dad is from Guatemala. I'm first generation American, first in my nuclear family and in my mom's family to go to college, definitely first in my entire family to be a career professional and be a part of mid-wage and high-wage work in the United States.

I think the crazy thing about that to me is there are so many rules, like norms and things that you don't know when you come into this world. And I think in particular, I have learned a lot about power because when you have spent an entire life not benefiting from a lot of systemic power, and then all of a sudden you're in a hierarchy and you have an organizational power or an ecosystem power, it becomes very clear to you.

When I went to college, I went to the University of Southern California and started work with young people when I was like 19 and a camp counsellor, helping run a camp for low-income students that were third to fifth graders in South Central Los Angeles, and it was my first encounter at any measure of power. And then it took until about six years ago when I became an executive to really start to see what power was, because no one explains it. People will give you a job, and give you the parameters of the job and the "things you're supposed to get done", but they don't talk to you explicitly about the tools you now have at your disposal, because you have more power, or the disproportionate impact of those tools on other people.

One of the things that I have learned deeply at this stage in the game, and much like most people, I have learned it off the backs of the people that have worked for me. I want to be clear about that – this learning ends up coming at the consequence of other people, because we don't have a language around it. It is as you mess up, that you start to understand it.

What is Power, and the Triangle of Tension

I think that the first thing that I want to draw out for you that was shocking to me when I got into a position of power, was that when you have power, you are making choices on three different things at all times. Financial sustainability, so can everyone's salaries get paid? Am I going over budget, all of those questions. Impact, which, depending on what industry you're in, (I was in the social justice field working, first in education, then in healthcare, most recently in technology), so impact was people served. Are we meeting mission? But it can also be in whatever your field is, the production of the good that you are in charge of.

And I think sometimes people conflate that with financial sustainability, but those two things are two different things. Then the third thing is culture, right? Because once you get power, you are in charge of the experience of the people around you and the way that I parallel parked the car to understand this – and I say that because it's like when you're parallel parking a car and you can't quite fit in the space -- was making decisions that prioritized one of these things over others and facing the anger or resentment or sadness or disappointment that people had when your focus was obviously on financial sustainability and not on anything else. Or obviously you only care about culture and not anything else. Or obviously you only care about like our impact, but you don't care about anything else, and you start to get accused of that very early on when you start to get power. And you're like, "But no, I'm making choices here. This was one choice. I will make another choice at a different point in time." But the things that people don't explain to you, is that when you are in entry- and mid-levels of an organization, you are given decisions, like your decision-making rights do not impact the other two pieces of the triangle.

You are given decision making rights that are like, "Hey, I'm just going to be fully focused on impact." And I can be, and my sphere of influence does not mean that impact pushes up against financial sustainability or culture, or wherever on the wheel that you're making choices. And then as you move up an organizational ladder, you start to have choices where these things compete with each other.

You have to make decisions where one to two of the things in this triangle lose in service of the third piece, and that often also means when you are distributing power to people, they become very frustrated and very resentful because they don't like having to make that kind of a choice.

While you're trying to distribute power, people are constantly trying to give it back to you, and it takes an incredibly disciplined leader to walk people through the process so that they know that that hard decision-making, the no-win decisions, or the decisions that are not win-win, still have to be made.

How do I Help my Team Understand What Power is?

I went through this process of, "How do I help my team understand what power is? How do I help myself understand what power is?" Because I had enough of those moments where folks were disappointed or saddened. I remember one teammate telling me, "You know, Karla, it's not that I don't trust in you. I really do, but the way that this happened sucked," and really trying to understand what that meant.

And also fully understanding that, when I did that, the arc of understanding, when I was trying to translate those choices as being a strategy, I was not giving out enough information for people to understand the context around my decision making, and I didn't have language for what I was doing, and so a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about here is the language I was able to put to it, to be able to explain it to a team.

Institutional Power and its Prerequisites

So first we've got to ask ourselves, what is power? And I'm going to start with institutional power, because I believe that institutional power differs from the way we are experiencing social power right now; we're going to talk about that quite a bit. In order to attain institutional power, often the prerequisites for that have been: seniority, money, connections, patriarchy, and whiteness. In order to be given power in an organization, in a company, it was about time spent, the money and investment that you were able to make, the people that you knew and you're siding with, or performing the act of patriarchy, or performing whiteness on the job.

Those pre-existing traits and the performance of those traits gave you access to this bucket of power that came together in one package. Access to money, access to information, access to decision making - like decision making rights and decision makers. Both the ability to make the decisions and to be proximate to leaders who are making decisions, and the reach of your ideas, so the audience is obligated to you.

If I'm a CEO at a company and I send out an email, everyone's kind of got to read the email, or will be in some way, shape, or form held accountable for reading the email. If I am a coordinator and I send an email to the entire team, how many people have had the experience where you've put a lot of effort into putting down all sorts of information, and everyone's like, "Well, I don't know what was in that email" and act accordingly. And so, when we have an audience, the ability to shape narrative pops up, and there are all sorts of pieces to that, which we will talk about.

Social Power - How the Internet Has Changed Access to Power

This came in a package and still does to a great extent. Something really interesting is happening in this moment, which is, we are having a very different experience of power socially than we have institutionally, and that is happening maybe for the first time in human history. I imagine there was some separation of this as well when the printing press got created, but the internet has changed our relationship to this.

You've got the internet as a prerequisite, digital fluency, and creativity, and that gives you access to each of these things individually. All of a sudden, I have access to information that I did not have before. This became especially clear to me because I've spent the last year with long-haul COVID. I got COVID in the first round, really, of COVID on March 13th of 2020, and no one knew what long COVID was. And for those of you who do not know, long COVID is a persistent set of symptoms that exist post an acute COVID bout, sometimes without an acute COVID bout, that are like tachycardia, fatigue, all sorts of different kinds of pains, cognitive deficits, and disorders that you are working through, a loss of autonomic functions at times.

I'm on heart medication right now to keep my heart rate low, and it was really scary because, when I started to get long COVID, long COVID was not in the lexicon. The way that we discovered it, was that a lot of us started gathering online and talking to each other about it, and then patient advocacy groups started to form together online, and you could start to search the different symptoms that everyone was having. And then that search helped you go into doctor's offices with information, even though you were not a doctor, and say, "Hey, these are symptoms that are popping up for a lot of people. What you're saying was supposed to be over or saying is psychosomatic or anxiety-driven now is not true because it's happening in numbers to lots of people in the population." And a lot of folks, actually, with diseases that are not as explainable are now able to go online and search or subscribe to medical journals, information that used to only come to them through the seniority of a medical degree.

And often people will refer to that, and the agitation that the medical community has around that like, "Oh, they are WebMD-ing themselves," but it's important for us to see how much power that carries. Then you've got decision-making rights, so that ability to gather together, the ability to create pressure. We, as a long-COVID community, organized together. We created sticky messaging, petitioned the CDC, and then long-COVID started to get recognized at the beginning of last summer as a part of the disease that was happening to a third of the population that got it.

The decision-making rights to do that were not ours, but we were able to pressure the systems and institutions that were there in order to get it recognized, which helped with the loosening of insurance and a number of other things. We've seen this happen in other ways too - access to decision makers. The way that we got access to decision-makers was creating that very sticky message online in a way that could not be avoided, and whether that is happening as a result of folks talking about long-COVID, or talking about “Black Lives Matter”, like, uprisings that happened last year, post the George Floyd murder. You started to see and notice a bunch of different ways in which information, decision making, and access to decision-makers started, and the reach of ideas. It created people having slices of power that all used to be a part of an institutional package.

Before, I would've needed a PR firm and an agent that could pitch my story ideas to newspapers, and now, through the power of Twitter and organizing and information sharing on the internet, I'm able to move without that kind of gatekeeping. We've seen that a lot in small-dollar organizing when it comes to political campaigns. It used to be that the only way to guarantee the ability to have a well-funded campaign was to tap into the institutions that did this work and to be sponsored by them and to have the money and the donors that they came with, but now we're watching as the creation of a sticky message, trusted community, reputation as an individual actor, and urgency shape a world in which small-dollar donations can start to fund some of our major initiatives and some of our biggest political champions.

I started to know this because all of a sudden my audience on Twitter got bigger, and I went from having, within a set of a few weeks, something like 2000 Twitter followers to 14,000 Twitter followers, and the assumptions people made actually that, because I had that reach of audience, that I also had money or that I also had access to decision-makers, but that's not really how the new world of social power works.

Social power is having access to a slice of these things without having all of it and having a lot of different pressure points that you can access for it. And so now, you have these two worlds that are colliding, and I want to talk to you about the context of those two worlds. Not 30, 40 years ago, the workforce was predominantly male, like almost exclusively white. In particular, with high- and mid-wage work, almost exclusively white. It had two, maybe three generations in it. LGBTQIA populations were in the closet and socially ostracized at work when they came out, often, and folks with disabilities often hid those disabilities because they were not protected in the workplace.

Now, we have a situation where 40% of high- to mid-wage work is filled by women. We've got LGBTQIA populations out in the workplace for the first time. We've got five different generations in the workforce. We've got folks with disabilities requesting accommodations and really demanding their dignity be honoured, and we've got people of colour becoming a rising force within those company structures.

You have this situation where institutional power is working in the exact same way, but the population that is experiencing that looks incredibly different and their social experience of power is also incredibly different. And that is creating internal wars that are happening inside of the workplace, where folks can't understand, "If I can access power this way outside of the workplace, why can't I access power this way inside of institutions?" And are often doing what they can to bring those tools internally.

You're watching HR departments freak out about that because when folks are searching, subscribing, organizing, creating community, being creative, to create power within institutional structures, the institutional power structures get very paranoid about that. And I do think it is worth saying, that this new power that we're talking about, this social power has also come with a lot of harm, right? Yes, we have made incredible advances when it comes to things like #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter and people's awareness of those things, but we've also seen a rising force of white supremacy within the United States and abroad.

We have watched as unchecked, this power has been used to harm women and women of colour across the internet, and what happened during Gamergate, for those of you who are familiar with that moment in time and has continued to happen.

I just watched a story of a doctor in West Virginia go viral where she was talking about patients that she's seeing at the end of their lives, who are unvaccinated, and them begging her for a vaccination, and folks being like, "Oh, it's too late. I'm so sorry," she tells them, and that encourages their families to get vaccinated, and the moment that I saw that go viral, my first thought was like, "Oh my God, this poor woman and her safety." I immediately went to the white supremacist and anti-vaxxers that were going to be attacking her online because the social power that we're talking about here is like the wild west. It does not have controls or checks or balances, and it does not have protections for the most vulnerable; however, with that power, the vulnerable have also been able to create. There is a tension that happens there that I think is very frightening for institutions in particular.

The Dual Mandate - Institution Mission vs Equitable Organization

You start to see that tensions pop up for lots of different people, but often, let's say, white men in the workplace. That tension becomes front and center, something that women and men of colour, have to deal with. You start to have a dual mandate that pops up. One being the institution's mission, what you are there to do, the work you are there to produce, and the creation of an equitable organization. And while white men are petitioned to care about that, there is often no expectation that they will, and power is often invisible on white men in a way that, it is very visible on women and men of colour. And that is because, often we haven't had that power, whether that is in or outside of institutions.

When we do have access to information, decision making rights, decision makers, the reach of ideas and money, everyone's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here?" They have an expectation of us, that we will not perpetuate and continue to perpetuate, the same oppressive systems that kept so many of us out of the workplace, and I really believe that we have not understood, and we have short-sold the amount of work that there is to do, to create an equitable organization.

We have a segregated workforce in high- to mid-wage work, certainly in salaried work, across North America and that segregation has not changed. I always think about the picture of Ruby Bridges when she integrated schools in the United States. There's this picture of this little Black girl going into schools and the people around her screaming and yelling and her being surrounded by the National Guard and how much safety and protection it took to get her there and legal intervention it took for her to get there, and we have, to date, not had those interventions happen in the workplace.

You can only imagine all of the ways that, structurally, the workplace is segregated, whether that is in entry, retention, promotion, it shows up everywhere. You start to see it, because even when folks can get in, and I know that this particular group understands this more than most, women in male-dominated industries, like you get in, and two thirds of marginalized people will leave because that workplace is so hostile to them.

Gatekeeping of Power

I'm trying to remember the woman, what was the name of the woman earlier who told us about her new great promotion? I think it's clear that you deserved that promotion, or you deserved that ability to move up the hierarchical chain and to be able to do your best work before this. But the gatekeeping of power and the ways that it has been structured so that only certain people get access to it, means we are experiencing a workplace that has so much work left to do, to represent that, and unfortunately, we are going to be the ones that unwind that. Because historically, we haven't seen the project as an urgent project to take on.

And that means you're getting a bunch of young people -- I think actually it's impacting the entire workplace across age -- but you are getting a bunch of young people that look at that gatekeeping, look at the way that they have access to social power in their world, and come into institutions and they're like, "We're not having it anymore. We're not going to do this." And often I think we misunderstand how much we know about how to create an equitable workforce. And we think it is a project that can happen overnight when really it is a project that it's going to take the labour of many, many, many people to understand and unwind. And that's when we get to innovation.

Innovating with the Dual Mandate

That's the moment in time that we are in, and the demographic shift of the United States in particular, is forecasted to be majority Black and Latinx by 2043, and that will end up becoming an apartheid economy at that point, if we are not innovating highly.

Now, I don't know the stats for Canada, but I imagine that we're along similar tracks in that way, and it's going to take all of us to really look at it. What does it mean to innovate with that dual mandate?