Introduction to the Power Loop

Power to society is what energy is to physics.

Introduction

Power to society is what energy is to physics. Without power, we can’t accomplish anything that involves other people. Power itself is neither good nor evil — it’s neutral. In fact, power is good in good hands. That’s why power literacy is a crucial skill for anyone who wants to change the world around them. This article explores how power flows through social systems and how we can engage with that flow to reshape the power landscape around us. 

The most misunderstood concept in history

Power shapes our societies. Hundreds of millions of people have died in conflicts over power. Empires have been built and destroyed as a result of power struggles. The history of humankind is the history of power.

Despite being such a crucial part of our lives, power is something that everyone understands intuitively—but no one can define in a way that most would agree on. There are dozens of viewpoints on what power actually is, making it a contested concept—a concept without a universally accepted definition.

Meanwhile, several misconceptions about power are widely shared:

- Power is evil. Power often carries a Machiavellian flavor—a perception of ruthlessness in achieving one’s aims. However, non-ethical doesn’t mean unethical; it simply means that ethical considerations are not part of the agenda. Machiavelli didn’t pursue evil ends; he was indifferent to the means. Power itself has no built-in morality. Like energy, it can be used for both good and bad. When a parent exercises power to build a child’s habit of tooth-brushing, most would agree that power is being used benevolently.

- Power requires formal or informal authority. A parent has informal authority, while a president has formal authority. Some are entitled to lead; others lead through charisma, expertise, or seniority. However, these two pillars of power apply only to personal power. We humans are often too focused on ourselves, which leads to a fixation on personal power. Yet agency is not reserved for humans—a point we’ll explore later. For now, consider a traffic light: it can compel people to stop or go. The traffic light has power, even though it wasn’t elected by a majority vote and possesses no charisma whatsoever.

The first misconception creates a pejorative flavor around power. Striving for power is often seen as a vice rather than a virtue. As a result, few people are trained to navigate power landscapes. This is unfortunate, because without power literacy, we limit our chances of succeeding in a mission widely considered virtuous — to make the world a better place.

The second misconception narrows the ways we amplify our agency. We tend to focus on gaining formal power — by getting promoted at work or elected to public office — or on developing leadership skills. In both cases, we become more powerful, which makes it easier to advance our own agendas. But humans are not the only carriers of power, and conveying an agenda doesn’t always require increasing our own “power tanks.”

Once these two misconceptions are set aside, we can begin to explore power without bias.

The Power Loop

There are many different approaches that attempt to explain power. Here are two of the most influential ones:

• Postpositional (Pitkin, Morriss, Follett): Power is what happens after—it reveals itself in relationships and outcomes. Power is like a footprint: you only see it once it has left a mark.

• Dispositional (Lukes, Giddens, Haugaard): Power is the capacity or potential to act, even when unused. Power is like electricity in a wire—it exists whether or not the switch is flipped.

The first approach helps us understand how power operates in interactions, while the second helps us understand how power is structured within systems.

The next model combines insights from both perspectives, viewing power as a dynamic flow within a structured loop — the Power Loop.

Let’s take a loop around the Power Loop first.

Decisions

When we think about power, we often imagine a body of authority — a person or a government — making a decision. A business leader decides to close an underperforming business unit; a government issues a new law; a parent chooses which kindergarten a child should attend — all of these are decisions.

Decisions are commitments to specific courses of action (or inaction) that direct future events. They are the most visible layer of power.

Agendas

Before something can be discussed or decided upon, it must appear on the agenda. Agendas are prioritized lists of topics and concerns. Every government session has an agenda. A project backlog is an agenda. A parent’s list of concerns about the choice of kindergarten is also an agenda.

The way items are presented — or not presented — on an agenda shapes which decisions are made and which are ignored. That’s why getting a topic onto the agenda is often more powerful than finding the best possible solution to it.

Institutions

Agendas are curated by the machinery of institutions. Institutions are formal or informal structures that organize decision-making. The German state is an institution. The Scrum framework for agile projects is an institution. A family calendar on the fridge is also an institution.

A defining characteristic of any institution is its recurring practices and rituals — government sessions, sprint plannings, or the evening ritual of checking the family calendar for tomorrow’s chores.

Agendas and institutions represent the hidden layers of power. They embody what matters, and by doing so, they materialize structural biases across all social systems — from families to states.

Beliefs

Institutions are enabled by beliefs. Beliefs are shared assumptions that guide perception and behavior. 

• “Germans are a nation” is a shared belief. 

• “We must be agile to prosper in a dynamic business environment” is a shared belief.

• “We are a family unit” is a shared belief.

Beliefs give legitimacy to institutions. The belief that “Germans are a nation” legitimized the establishment of the German state. If people lose their shared national identity, the state may eventually perish — though the wheels of bureaucracy may keep it running for a while.

In turn, institutions reinforce beliefs through their rituals and practices. The German state reinforces national identity through instruments such as passports, schools and the national football team.

Beliefs are the most invisible and durable stock of power.

Events

Power doesn’t only flow from invisible beliefs toward visible decisions — it also flows the other way around. Decisions set actions or inactions in motion, both leading to visible outcomes — events. A major factory closure that leads to thousands of layoffs is an event. Meeting or missing a delivery deadline is an event. Events can be internal (decision-driven, like closing the factory) or external (such as rain or war).

Events themselves are neutral; they gain meaning only when interpreted through narratives.

Narratives

Narratives explain events — and can either justify or challenge decisions.

“The government’s free-trade policies encouraged outsourcing and destroyed domestic jobs.”

That’s a narrative.

Narratives can address both internal and external events. For instance, a flood can be explained as a natural disaster or as a consequence of government negligence regarding climate change — even though the government never “decided” to cause the flood.

Over time, narratives can shape beliefs. Repeated criticism of free-trade policies can foster a belief that the government is unable to protect the economy or safeguard domestic jobs. As beliefs shift, institutions built upon them may begin to shake — a tactic that populist parties often apply to destabilize functioning democracies.

Narratives can also bring new concerns onto the agenda. If criticism of free trade persists, it may raise tariff regulations as a topic on the government’s agenda. 

Another example: right-wing populists amplify migration narratives to heighten public concern and push for stricter immigration policies. Their goal is not to solve problems but to occupy governments with unsolvable ones. The strategy is to use new policies as events for constructing fresh narratives of government failure — ultimately cultivating a belief in mistrust and destabilizing institutions.

Similarly, left-wing populists exploit events—whether real or fabricated—to sustain narratives of grievance. Within these narratives, they cast themselves as victims and direct their anger toward those they portray as oppressors. Like their right-wing counterparts, such narratives target the layer of beliefs, dividing society into “the good” and “the bad.” This binary framing undermines the shared belief in collective identity and gradually erodes social cohesion and resilience.

The Power in Flow

The Power Loop model illustrates how power flows through social systems. In any social system — whether an organization or a country — the following elements define its Architecture of Power:

• dominant beliefs

• established institutions

• agenda-setting bodies

• decision-making authorities

• recurring event patterns

• and popular narratives

Each of these layers embodies part of the system’s architecture, while the flow of power sustains it.

However, the flow of power can also be redirected to transform that architecture. This is easier to achieve when one holds institutional authority — the power to set agendas and make decisions. Yet there are also points of engagement available even to those without formal authority, such as highlighting events and constructing narratives. It is not uncommon not to construct narratives based on fake events. The moral evaluation of this tactic is beyond the scope of this article. 

It’s important to note that directly imposing new beliefs or questioning institutional authority can be dangerous. Giordano Bruno, who introduced new cosmological beliefs, and Joan of Arc, who defied the authority of the Church tribunal, are tragic proofs of this.

Martin Luther, in contrast, was more successful: he didn’t challenge Christian beliefs or the purpose of the Church itself, but rather how the institution was misused by those controlling its Agenda and Decisions.

Even engaging directly at the agenda-setting or decision-making levels can end fatally:

• Che Guevara brought revolutionary ideas to the agenda of the Bolivian peasantry but failed to gain popular support — he was executed. The story of Jesus follows a similar pattern.

• Maximilien Robespierre acted as if embodying the “General Will,” but once legitimacy turned against him, he too faced the guillotine.

The following section outlines two examples of engaging with the flow of power and transforming its Architecture.

The Power Loop in Action

Example 1: Building an Institution to avoid the arbitrary use of Power 

Institutions have a constraining function. They can constrain both their subjects (for example, all children in Germany are obliged to attend school) and those who hold formal authority (for instance, the German Chancellor cannot rule Germany like a medieval king). Thus, institutions are balancing tools against the arbitrary use of power. 

When social structures lack organized decision-making, arbitrariness often emerges as a consequence of missing democratic institutions. Business founders frequently enjoy near-absolute power even when their startups have grown into organizations with thousands of employees.

On a smaller scale, this phenomenon is also common. For example, system architects may enjoy autocratic autonomy in decision-making without involving other experts. In such cases, decisions are often undocumented — they simply make them as they please and inform others to implement them. There are no traces explaining why things work the way they do. Over time, these decision-makers become indispensable knowledge monopolists — without them, the project would collapse.

Directly challenging their authority — through public or hidden criticism, or by requesting the establishment of meritocratic decision-making bodies — can result in social death.

In other words: don’t bark at the alpha dog. Outsmart it by establishing an institution.

Here’s how:

•  Create new events. Offer to take over the dirty work no one else wants — documenting decisions, designs, interfaces, or any technical details that could be useful. This step won’t be seen as a challenge to the alpha dog’s authority and will gain broad support. 

• Enable a narrative. Once decisions become tangible, they give rise to a narrative: “There is documentation. Everyone can read it — even comment on it.” This cultivates a belief in collaborative documentation, which helps establish documentation itself as an institution, complete with its own rituals: reviewing, discussing, updating. Over time, documenting and reviewing decisions become items on the agenda.

• Shift Beliefs. As the documentation institution matures and gains adoption, it cultivates a new shared Belief: “Decisions can not only be recorded and reviewed afterward — they can also be made collectively by a meritocratic body, such as an Architecture Board.”

At this point, the arbitrary alpha dog no longer has enough personal power to stop the “uprising” - they are neutralized without a single "bark". As mentioned above, humans are not the sole source of agency. Institutions are agents too. 

Example 2: Extending the Agenda

Let's assume you operate within proper democratic structures — a city council or an Architecture Board. You trust them to make sound decisions, yet you feel they are not addressing the right problems.

For example, a city council might attempt to solve the housing crisis by building more homes but completely overlook the need for additional infrastructure capacities — roads, schools, kindergartens, electricity, water, or bike lanes. Similarly, an Architecture Board might choose a database purely based on technical criteria, ignoring the social dependencies between teams.

Now, let’s assume you have access to agenda-setting bodies — you can attend open city council sessions or Architecture Board weeklies — but you have no formal mandate to decide, nor to decide what is to be decided (i.e., to set the agenda).

In this situation, challenging decisions directly is pointless; within their agenda frames, those decisions might be perfectly rational. When architects design a solution and verify it against technical requirements, they are doing their job well. Their decisions are not the problem — the problem they are solving is. The goal here is to reframe the problem.

The inception points in this scenario are presenting events and creating narratives. Here are two examples:

• For the city council: “Our neighboring city built plenty of new housing, and residents eagerly moved in. Now they face shortages of kindergarten places, overcrowded schools, and constant traffic jams. Let’s address this issue holistically and recognize that solving the housing problem means expanding the entire infrastructure — from water supply to playgrounds.”

• For the Architecture Board: “Choosing a relational database meets our need for data consistency across components. But technical needs aren’t the only ones that matter. Because our teams are distributed, we should seek solutions that minimize communication dependencies. We also don’t want a single person to become a bottleneck by owning the entire schema. Let’s add these social aspects as evaluation criteria and revisit the design.” Such social aspects are also known as sociotechnical requirements.

These narratives serve to extend the agenda by introducing previously omitted factors. Such extensions may work once, but to achieve a lasting transformation, holistic thinking must be institutionalized — embedded into the rituals and practices of institutions such as city council sessions or architecture weeklies.

This is usually achieved by introducing new measurements — metrics for success (How good are we at what we do?) and for verification (Have we achieved what we intended?).

For the City Council:

• What is our overall infrastructure capacity score?

• What is our overall infrastructure load score?

• What is our load score per category (roads, housing, schools, etc.)?

For the Architecture Board:

• What are our sociotechnical requirements? (To be institutionalized, the fulfillment of these requirements should be added to Architecture Decision Records as standard checklist items). 

Once such measurements are embedded into institutional rituals, they no longer need to be brought up repeatedly — they become Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of the institution. Like in the previous example, SOPs are a source of institutional agency of non-human origin. Over time, these SOPs are internalized by the people operating within the institution and eventually sediment into their beliefs. By the way, this is how churches sustain themselves over centuries. 

Initially, people operate institutions, but ultimately, institutions operate people.

Conclusion

Power has no morality — it is neither good nor evil. Changing the world around us requires skillful navigation of power landscapes. That’s why power literacy is an essential social skill, as significant as leadership itself.

This article offers a brief introduction to the Power Loop — a model that illustrates how power flows through social systems and how engaging with this flow can create structural change in the surrounding power landscape.