If not the market alone, then who: The technical experts who have built these technologies and know more about them? At best, they may demand moral accountability, as many tech employees have, and remain faithful to their higher purpose. At worst, however, we risk losing the moral compass of our social systems because, as Renaissance writer François Rabelais presciently observed, “science without conscience is only ruin of the soul.”84 Leaving control over new technologies to any small group is dangerous, as it gives them permission to use them for their own benefit and thus free rein to concentrate ever more power in their own hands. It’s not hard to imagine the rich and powerful leveraging technologies like CRISPR to pay for genetic enhancements, longer and healthier lifespans, and what they consider to be genetically superior offspring.85 This is the kind of dystopia depicted in many books and movies, from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World, to the more recent movie Gattaca, and we are not immune to transforming it into reality.
Technological change always presents us with a choice between two paths: one leads to power for a minority, with dangerous consequences for everyone else; the other leads to shared decision-making about how to organize access to newly valued technologies. The only way for us to navigate this crossroads is to grasp what we can do to regain control over technology, assess its value in terms of its usefulness for society, and democratize access to it. Though their track records are far from perfect, both public policy and private enterprise initiatives have shown us that it is eminently possible to deploy technology not to maximize profits, but to optimize access, fairness, privacy, and usability.86 This is how power falls in the hands of many. And we can achieve and sustain such a democratization of power if we proactively keep it in check.
II. Changes in both the technology and its regulation and control are coming so fast and furiously that anything said one day might be contradicted by events the next. For things said in writing, like books, this is a particularly acute dilemma. Instead of repeatedly reminding you that what we say is “as we write,” we’d like to acknowledge here that we know whatever we have written will likely need revision by the time our book is published.
Chapter 8 Power in Check
Palazzo Pubblico offers stunning views of Siena’s shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, best known for the Palio horse race held there every summer since 1633. Visitors who manage to pull themselves away from Piazza del Campo’s hypnotic beauty and venture into Palazzo Pubblico are rewarded with another memorable sight: The Allegory of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, an extraordinary oeuvre of political art of medieval Italy.
When Lorenzetti painted the series of frescoes in 1338 and 1339, the Republic of Siena was one of the most powerful and prosperous Italian city-states. It was governed by nine elected citizens, the Government of the Nine, who remained in office for only two months, before giving way to another nine.1 The citizens of Siena commissioned the frescoes for the Sala della Pace (or Hall of Peace), where the nine governors met, to inspire their work and remind them of the momentous consequences of their decisions. The first two frescoes—one filled with allegorical figures of virtue and the other with symbols of evil—compare Good Government with Bad. The second pair provides contrasting views of a city, intended to be Siena: one showing citizens living together in safety, order, harmony, and prosperity; the other showing the city in ruins, its citizenry overcome by violence and destitution. Thousands of citizens were part of the Government of the Nine in its sixty-eight years of existence, when Siena enjoyed a period of splendor in urban architecture and cultural advances.2 During a politically turbulent century, marked by violent party struggles and constant governmental upheaval, the contrast between good and bad governance was vivid and stark.
Why do systems of governance matter so much? The answer is simple: No matter how hard we human beings try, we cannot rely solely on our good intentions to keep power’s hubris and egotism in check. History and personal experience teach us to be wary of excessive power in any form.3 Give any individual enough power for enough time and the risk of abuse inevitably increases. Even Vera Cordeiro, the Brazilian doctor we met in chapter 2, who was animated by a noble purpose, risked falling into this trap as her own fame and that of her NGO grew.
Although the risks of excessive power concentration can never be fully eradicated, social science has taught us a great deal about how to contain it. As the citizens of fourteenth-century Siena intuited, keeping power in check requires setting structural limits that ensure two things: first, that power is shared rather than concentrated in the hands of an individual or small group; and second, that those who are in power are held accountable. When family members and colleagues helped Vera recognize the deleterious effects power was having on her, she understood intuitively that she had to institute new practices that shared power and enabled others to hold her accountable in team meetings. As we will see, these two levers—sharing power and power accountability—apply not only to an individual leader of a team or to the governors of a medieval city-state, but to any workplace and any society. We have proven tools that we can all use to keep our power and that of others in check at work and in society.
SHARING POWER AT WORK
In 2013, Ellen Ochoa became the director of the Johnson Space Center (JSC), the home of NASA’s mission control and astronaut training program. The first Latina astronaut to have gone to space, she had worked tirelessly to accomplish her dreams. She knew firsthand that for someone like her, being the most qualified for a job was no guarantee of getting it. “If you are a White male engineer, people are just going to assume that you’re a good engineer unless proven otherwise; whereas if you come in as a woman engineer, or a Black engineer, or a Latinx engineer, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt. You’re going to have to prove yourself before anybody will pay attention to you.”4
Ellen’s experience was neither unique nor limited to the world of engineering. Organizational power in Western countries remains largely concentrated in the hands of White men, despite the growing number of qualified people from other demographic groups in the workplace. These same groups also continue to be disadvantaged in compensation and access to resources compared to groups with long-standing power differentials in their favor.5 Organizations have thus contributed to reproducing gender and racial inequalities that stem from the power hierarchies we dissected in chapter 5.6
This realization was what led Michael Coats, Ellen’s predecessor as JSC’s director, to make diversity and inclusion one of the priorities of his tenure. A former astronaut, his experiences in both the public and private sectors had made him “a firm believer in the power of diversity,” as he put it.7 Michael didn’t just talk about the need to make the JSC more inclusive, he worked closely with Ellen, then his deputy director, to make it more inclusive. “He said that he wanted women and racial minorities to have the same opportunities men like him had. At first, I was surprised,” Ellen recalled, “but we got to work, and it was clear this was not just discourse; he was committed to making change happen.”
Diversity, they advocated, could contribute to innovation. “Both Mike and I believed that if we failed to make every single person at JSC feel valued at work so they could be the best version of themselves, we were limiting the organization’s potential,” Ellen explained. That was not their only rationale, though. “It’s not only the right thing for the organization, it’s the right thing, period. My personal experience made that clear. After all, I was a Latina in STEM! From my days as a PhD student in physics… I was made to understand women weren’t ‘supposed to be engineers,’ [and to feel] like an outsider who didn’t belong.”
Michael’s and Ellen’s belief that making the Johnson Space Center a more inclusive place could help the organization thrive aligns with research on diversity that has found that it can lead to increased organizational effectiveness.8 Demographic diversity alone will not make an organization more inclusive, however. For that to happen, power has to be shared more equ
ally across all demographic groups, instead of remaining concentrated in the hands of the usual suspects.9 The question for Michael and Ellen, and one that organizations continue to grapple with today, was how to orchestrate such a shift.
For some time, public attention had concentrated on encouraging women to “lean in”10 and climb the organizational ladder. Ellen had learned the hard way, though, that as important as it is to put your hand up, voice your opinion, and insist on being heard and considered, “leaning in” wasn’t enough to change the distribution of power in an organization. Instead of playing the game better, what was needed was changing the rules of the game.
Ellen’s experience had also taught her that while getting a few people from underrepresented groups into senior roles could help break down barriers and inspire others, it would barely change the distribution of power. While such token representatives are visible, their heightened visibility creates more pressure for them to perform at higher levels. They are also likely to feel—and be—isolated, and their opinions may be marginalized. In her pioneering research, Rosabeth Moss Kanter pointed out that the psychological consequences of tokenism—unsatisfactory social relationships, miserable self-imagery, frustration from contradictory demands, inhibition of self-expression, and feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred—take an enormous toll, even if the person’s work performance is exemplary.11 Yet many companies have indulged in just this sort of tokenism, appointing a small number of people from underrepresented groups to leadership and Board positions, as symbols of gender and racial equality.12 Not only does this practice fail to enable real power redistribution, it can be a real obstacle to it.
Together with Alicia DeSantola and Lakshmi Ramarajan, we studied the composition of the Boards of more than two thousand entrepreneurial ventures over two decades and found that while they were likely to add a woman to the Board at the time of an IPO if they had none, they were unlikely to add a second woman if one was already serving.13 Having one woman has seemed sufficient to be regarded as doing the right thing. But it is certainly not enough to change power dynamics. Research on Boards has found that a critical mass (set at around 30 percent by some) must be reached for the Board environment to become more receptive to meaningful contributions in terms of oversight, new ideas, and divergent thinking.14
What else, then, could Ellen and Mike do to change the distribution of power? Diversity training meant to make employees aware of their unconscious biases and readjust their behavior to overcome them is a popular tool; and its popularity makes sense because, as we saw in chapter 5, biases rooted in entrenched stereotypes are major obstacles to changing the distribution of power. So, Ellen and Mike made diversity training mandatory for all employees at JSC. They knew, however, that such training, on its own, doesn’t alter behavior or change the workplace,15 because it typically does nothing to give those who are discriminated against access to valued resources. From that standpoint, diversity training doesn’t fundamentally change or even challenge who has power in the organization. In fact, when people who go through it believe that the mere existence of diversity training makes their organization more meritocratic, it might even be counterproductive. Such complacency opens the door to even more discrimination.16
The problem is not diversity training, per se—it’s thinking that it alone solves the problem. Researchers who have studied what it takes to make an organization’s culture more inclusive have reached the same conclusion: Real change requires multipronged interventions that enable the redistribution of power.17 In addition to focusing on people’s individual attitudes and biases, such change efforts require reconsidering all the organization’s existing processes and systems—from recruiting to promotion, compensation, and access to plum professional opportunities—in order to understand how they contribute to unequal access to resources for different groups in the organization.18
To undertake these very tasks, Michael and Ellen established an Innovation and Inclusion Council, a committee of senior leaders, human resources representatives, members of the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, and employee representatives who rotated for two-year terms. Entrusting these tasks to a committee enables both data-driven decision-making and in-depth diagnosis of organizational practices.19 Absent such diagnosis, the risk is that the most visible inequalities are denounced, but their causes are never tackled.20
The council systematically tracked who applied to jobs and who was promoted. It led them to realize that JSC needed to expand its recruiting channels and involve not just one senior person per department, but a diverse group of team members in the recruiting process. The objective was to cut off network-based recruitment in favor of recruiting through broader, more diverse channels. Doing so requires proactively reaching out to, and investing in, organizations that work with underrepresented groups21 and then, ideally, adhering to blind résumé reviews, whereby information on a candidate’s age, gender, race, and socioeconomic background is hidden as much as possible.22 The goal is to conduct a recruitment process that is systematic and equitable for all candidates, rather than relying on an interviewer’s gut feel or a candidate’s cultural fit, which so often excludes high-potential candidates who don’t have the same profile as the people in charge of hiring.23
A fairer recruiting process is no guarantee that the new hires will succeed, however. So, the council turned to the Center’s employees to better understand the challenges they faced and how the organization could help address them. “If you want to address a problem, you need to talk to those who are experiencing it,” Ellen told us. Management scholars Laura Morgan Roberts and Tony Mayo agree, underscoring the importance of engaging in this kind of dialogue to build trust, foster empathy, and enable perspectives-sharing.24 Listening to those who are discriminated against and giving them a say in redesigning the organization’s policies and procedures, can reduce the risk of discrimination, while also redistributing power within the organization.25
These conversations provided a critical insight for Ellen when she became JSC’s director and continued the work she had started with Michael and the council members. They had been paying scant attention to another way in which people gain power in organizations: through the host of informal opportunities that give employees access to networks, plum assignments, visibility, and other valuable resources. Deciding who would stand in for a manager on leave, participate on a center-wide team, or give a tour of the center to an influential guest—like a member of Congress or the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—typically fell to the department heads. And, as is common across many workplaces, they would typically turn to their “go-to” person. Hence the virtuous (or vicious) cycle of opportunity (or exclusion) would continue. To disrupt this pattern, Ellen piloted and then launched the Transparency Opportunity Program (TOP), which posted internally all informal opportunities (coined “TOPportunities” by the staff), so that people who might have been overlooked, but were eager and ready to contribute had a chance to volunteer. The system was designed to ensure that everyone at the Center knew about existing opportunities and to encourage underrepresented groups to seize them.
Then, Ellen went a step further, one that is crucial for changing a culture: She made the implementation of TOP part of managers’ performance evaluation. Going forward, managers’ reviews would be linked, in part, to their ability to foster this cultural change and distribute resources more fairly within their teams. Ellen’s strategy paid off. Opportunities were more fairly distributed across employees by the time she left her position. Vanessa Wyche, who worked at the JSC at the time and went on to become the center’s deputy director a year after Ellen’s departure, recalled, “Ellen didn’t just climb up the ladder by herself; she climbed, and she brought other people along. And it’s a lasting legacy. I would not be in the chair that I am in today if Ellen Ochoa had not made it such that I could have the visibility and the opportunities to be able to be selected. She did that not only for me, but for
so many of us women and minorities. She helped redistribute and share power.”
Ellen was proud of the organization’s progress, but, as she told us, “this work isn’t about reaching a destination. It requires constant vigilance, creativity, and renewed commitment.” While the route to power sharing remains long and winding, we now have a roadmap for orchestrating this shift. As the social psychologist and diversity scholar Robert Livingston puts it, “The real challenge for organizations is not figuring out ‘What we can do,’ but rather, ‘Are we willing to do it?’ ”26
Once we achieve a more equitable power distribution in organizations, the challenge is to hold those with power to account. Everything we have learned about power and its effects on human psychology makes it clear that those who have power need to be held accountable, no matter what their demographic characteristics and aspirations may be. None of us is immune to hubris and self-focus—not even Miriam, the Holocaust survivor we met in chapter 2, who was horrified to have felt superior and distant from “the little people” after experiencing power for just one day. Hopefully tomorrow’s leaders will be more diverse than they are today, but we will still run the risk of power abuse, unless everyone in power is held accountable.
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