This is the third in a series exploring each of the 5 Lenses, the framework I use to help boards and leaders see more of the system when navigating complex change.
Last month, I explored the People lens and what hesitation reveals about a system. I ended with a question: what are we currently asking individuals to carry that really belongs at an organisational level? The Power lens is where that question gets answered. It asks who has the authority to change what individuals are absorbing, and whether they have the capacity to use it.
Most conversations about power in organisations start in the wrong place. They ask who holds authority, whether decision rights are clear, and whether people feel safe to speak. All of those questions matter. But they miss a more uncomfortable one: even where authority appears clear and people report feeling able to speak, does the person with something to say have the time, energy, organisational standing, and capacity to act on what they know?
Felt authority is shaped by both structure and capacity. But capacity is often the hidden or unacknowledged constraint that determines whether formal authority is ever actually used.
By a Power gap, I mean the space between where authority is located on paper and where the capacity to act actually sits in practice. In practice, that gap often becomes self-reinforcing: low capacity suppresses voice, suppressed voice reduces visibility of the problem, and reduced visibility means the conditions that created the gap go unchanged. That cycle is what this lens is designed to surface.
Recently, I worked with a team that had been through a significant restructure. Roles were redefined, responsibilities clarified. On paper, people should have had more authority than before. In practice, almost nothing had changed.
When I asked what got in the way, the responses were consistent. People could see what needed addressing and they knew who needed to hear it. But when they ran the mental calculation: the time it would take to raise it, the conversations that would follow, the energy required to sustain the argument if it was pushed back, the credibility it might cost them. They let it go. Not because they lacked standing. Because they did not have enough capacity left.
What I was hearing could have been explained several ways. The restructure may have been poorly designed. Cultural norms may not have shifted to match the new structures. People may have been waiting to see whether the change would hold before investing in it. All of those were possible.
But what kept appearing, across every conversation, was something different: the calculation. Not "can I say this?" but "can I afford to?" That is a capacity question, and it is the one many governance and change frameworks still struggle to name clearly. It was a Power gap, one the org chart alone could not explain.
This is the version of power that most frameworks do not account for. The formal structures say one thing. The reality of who has the capacity to act when they have authority says something quite different.
Capacity here is not just time or energy. It includes the credibility and backing required to sustain a challenge, and those are not evenly distributed. They are granted, protected, or withdrawn by the system itself. Which means the gap between formal authority and felt authority is not a personal failing. It is a structural condition.
That condition becomes most visible at a specific moment: when someone raises a concern and the response, explicit or implied, is "that is your problem." The question at that point is not whether they have the right to push back. They almost always do. The question is whether they have enough in reserve to sustain a challenge that the other party can simply afford to wait out.
That asymmetry is a power dynamic. It just does not show up on any decision-rights matrix.
The connection between capacity and voice is well supported, even if it is rarely framed in those terms.
Research by Sherf, Parke and Isaakyan, published in the Academy of Management Journal, provides a useful foundation. Their meta-analysis demonstrates that voice and silence are independent constructs, not simply opposite ends of the same spectrum. Silence is more strongly associated with burnout than voice is with engagement. And psychological safety, while important, relates more strongly to silence than to voice: it reduces the interpersonal risk of speaking, but does not guarantee that speaking leads to impact (Sherf, Parke & Isaakyan, 2021).
Taken together, this suggests a loop that many organisations are not managing. Depleted people go quiet. People who go quiet carry the weight of what they have not said. The carrying depletes them further. An organisation can invest heavily in psychological safety and still be caught in this loop, because safety is a necessary condition for voice, not a sufficient one.
Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel's research on organisational energy, developed at Henley Business School and the University of St Gallen, offers a useful diagnostic frame. They identify four energy states in organisations: productive energy, where intensity and positivity combine to drive performance; comfortable energy, stable but complacent; corrosive energy, where intensity turns destructive; and resigned inertia, low intensity and negative, where people have stopped trying. Not dramatically, not all at once, but incrementally, as the accumulated cost of raising things and seeing nothing change makes it rational to disengage (Bruch & Vogel, 2011).
Through the Power lens, resigned inertia is less a motivation problem and more a structural signal that the capacity conditions required for voice have been systematically eroded.
CIPD's 2024 review of psychological safety research adds a distinction that matters here. Psychological safety and felt authority are not the same thing. You can feel safe to speak and still have no genuine influence over what happens. Through the Power lens, I use the term felt authority to describe the belief that your input will actually affect what happens. The CIPD review highlights the gap between safety and impact; felt authority is what lives in that space. When people experience that gap consistently, when the invitation to speak exists but the change never follows, they stop treating the invitation as meaningful.
At the recent PMI Goals2Results Performance Improvement in an AI-Driven World conference, the Bias, Ethics and Trust workshop run by Sean Buckland introduced a scenario: an organisation deploys AI to accelerate a process, only to discover later that the process itself was harmful. The rationale that allowed it to happen: efficiency is always good. The impact: harm scaled faster.
The scenario is hypothetical. But the Power gap it describes is not. Through the Power lens, this reveals a critical additional failure alongside the ethical one. Someone had the authority to deploy the technology. Nobody had the standing, the capacity, or the incentive to ask whether the underlying process was worth accelerating. Who could have stopped it? What would it have cost them to try? Those are Power questions. They just arrived wearing an AI label.
This pattern is particularly visible in many care, support, and purpose-led organisations. The people closest to the problems, frontline workers, practitioners, those delivering services directly, are also the most capacity-depleted. The people most likely to see where Power is failing are the least resourced to do anything about it. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural pattern.
There is a useful image for this. At the same PMI conference, keynote speaker Dr Daniel Hulme put up an org chart and then overlaid it with the relationships that actually shape how things get done: the golf buddies, the old scores, the deals done in corridors. The formal structure was still there. It just was not the whole picture, or even most of it.
The Power lens does not replace the org chart. But it asks you to look at both layers at once, because governance that only addresses the formal structure is working with, at best, half the information it needs.
Here is how Power gaps typically show up at three levels.
At board level, power is most visible as governance: who has authority over what, how decisions are made, where accountability sits. The risk here is confusing structural clarity with functional authority. A well-designed decision rights framework is not the same as a culture where decisions are actually taken at the right level, by people who have the capacity to own them. Boards that focus on the architecture of power without attending to the conditions in which people exercise it will keep seeing escalation, stalling, and decisions that nobody wants to own, regardless of how clear the governance documents are. The question to ask is not "do our governance structures give people authority?" but "do the people with authority have what they need to use it?"
At line manager level, the Power lens becomes a question of absorption. Managers sit at the boundary between what the organisation asks and what their team can carry. Their authority is real but conditional: conditional on the level above having genuinely delegated it, and on the team having enough capacity to act. A manager who sees their people depleted and has no standing to reduce the load is not failing at their job. They are a person inside a Power gap, being asked to translate the distance between the organisation's rhetoric and its reality into something that functions day to day. The risk is that this translation happens invisibly, and the cost is carried by the manager rather than surfaced to the level where it belongs.
At individual level, the Power lens is experienced as a daily calculation. Do I have enough to take this on? If I raise it, will anything change? Am I absorbing something that genuinely belongs at a different level? These questions are not complaints. They are rational responses to a system that has distributed accountability without distributing the capacity to act on it.
When someone says "that is your problem" and you absorb it without pushing back, it is worth asking honestly: was that because it was genuinely yours to own, or because you had already decided you did not have enough energy left to argue?
The most common organisational response to these patterns is to treat them as wellbeing challenges. People are under too much pressure. Workload needs addressing. Resilience training might help.
This response is not wrong. But when capacity depletion is systemic and persistent, it is also a power issue. The organisation has, deliberately or by default, created conditions where authority flows upwards and accountability flows downwards. People at the top have enough in reserve to keep deflecting. People below do not have enough in reserve to keep pushing back.
A wellbeing response adds support. A power response changes structure: what stops, who decides, where the accountability for reducing load actually sits. In practice, that might mean stopping non-essential reporting, shifting decision rights closer to delivery, redesigning escalation routes, or explicitly resourcing the work of follow-through rather than assuming it will happen alongside everything else.
There is also an accountability question worth naming. When a senior leader says "that is your problem", whether in those words or through what they leave unanswered, they are exercising power. It is not neutral. It is a choice about who carries the cost. The Power lens asks organisations to name those moments, not as individual failures in relationships, but as data points about how capacity and accountability are actually distributed.
A conversation with Matt Lambert at Street Support Network has sharpened how I think about the relational dimension of this. If the earlier sections describe the mechanics of a Power gap, what Matt adds is the relational test for recognising one from the inside, and for asking whether what looks like governance is actually its shadow.
Working in the homelessness sector, Matt observed that the three conditions people need before they can engage with any support: safety, belonging, and clear boundaries, are the same three conditions that make governance work in any organisation. What struck me was not the framework itself but what he identified happening to each condition when organisations get it wrong. Safety becomes control. Belonging becomes performance. Boundaries become legalism. The words in the policy documents stay the same. The effect on people is opposite.
This maps directly onto the Power lens. When capacity is depleted and voice is suppressed, it is worth asking which version of the organisation you are actually in. The governance architecture may look identical on paper. The relational conditions determine whether people experience it as something worth contributing to, or something to manage their way through.
Matt offers three diagnostic questions for any governance mechanism, principle, or practice. I have found them useful alongside the Power lens work:
Is this safety or control? Does it enable honesty, or does it incentivise concealment?
Is this belonging or performance? Does accountability feel like shared stewardship, or like an audience watching for failure?
Are these boundaries or legalism? Do the structures build good judgement over time, or enforce compliance without understanding?
(With thanks to Matt Lambert, Street Support Network, whose thinking on relational governance has added to this article.)
Using the Power lens means asking, at every stage of change: who has the authority to act here, and do they have the capacity to use it?
In practical terms, this means building Power questions into how you design meetings, authorise projects, and allocate follow-through, not just reviewing them in retrospect.
These questions are a starting point:
When someone stays quiet in a meeting, what is the first assumption? That they agree, or that they have run a calculation about the cost of speaking?
Who in this organisation can afford to say "that is your problem"? Who absorbs what gets deflected to them, and why?
At what levels does authority exist on paper but not in practice? What capacity gap explains the difference?
When a concern is raised, who bears the load of pursuing it, and do they have the space to do that without compromising their core work?
When did you last stay quiet not because you could not speak, but because you had already decided you could not afford to?
These are not comfortable questions. That is the point.
Where I have seen this shift, it has not come from a programme or a framework rollout. It has come from one specific decision. A leadership team that stopped two standing reports nobody was acting on, and used the time to resource the follow-through on issues that had been raised and parked. A board that moved a recurring concern out of supervision and into an operational review with a standing agenda item, so voice had a route to action rather than just a space to be heard. These are small structural moves. But they are the difference between naming a Power gap and closing one
If a board took one action on the Power lens in the next thirty days, it would be to answer this question honestly: where are we consistently asking people to raise issues without resourcing any follow-through? And within the constraints you actually control, because external requirements and statutory duties are real, what are you willing to stop or reallocate to close that gap?
That is where felt authority lives. And it is where trust erodes fastest when nothing changes.
The Power lens is not about locating blame in the hierarchy. It is about making the invisible visible. In practice, that often means starting somewhere small and concrete: identifying one or two issues that have been raised but left unresourced, and making a deliberate choice about what changes. Not a transformation programme. A decision.
The Power lens alone will not fix broken processes or build organisational capability. But without understanding where capacity is creating Power gaps, the other lenses cannot do their full work. A team with clear purpose and capable, committed people will still stall if the people with the most relevant knowledge have too little left in reserve to use it.
The People lens asked what we are currently expecting individuals to carry that really sits at an organisational level. The Power lens asks who has the authority and capacity to move it, and what needs to change structurally for that to happen.
Next month, I will turn to the Process lens: how the way work is designed shapes who carries what, and where the structural patterns that produce Power gaps are either challenged or quietly reinforced.
For now, the question is a simple one. Not "who has the authority?" but "who has enough capacity left to use it?"
Bruch, H. & Vogel, B. (2011). Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization's Energy and Ignite High Performance. Harvard Business Review Press. View book
CIPD (2024). Trust and Psychological Safety: An Evidence Review. London: CIPD. View report
Lambert, M. (2026). Safety, Belonging, Boundaries: The relational conditions that make governance principles real. Unpublished conversation piece, Street Support Network. Shared with permission.
Sherf, E. N., Parke, M. R. & Isaakyan, S. (2021). Distinguishing voice and silence at work: Unique relationships with perceived impact, psychological safety, and burnout. Academy of Management Journal, 64(1), 114–148. View paper
This article was co-created through a human-led process using several AI models – including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity – as thinking partners. It reflects our commitment to ethical, transparent, and accountable use of AI, where human judgement, curiosity, and oversight remain central.