Image by quang-nguyen-vinh
Last week during the opening retreat of the Community Leadership Accelerator (CLA), I was grateful for important lessons about learning and unlearning and enacting power through play. As one of the leaders of the program, I always learn a lot, but it’s not usually the experiential sort of learning that we curate for the participants. This time was different.
In the first couple of days, we spend some time thinking about and embodying the process of letting go of things we know so that we can learn new ways of being and doing. I love this part of the retreat (for a fun example, watch this video).
We often think of learning as just stacking on something new to what we already know. Sometimes it is that, if we have no prior knowledge or experience of something. But as adults, especially in the realm of work and leadership, we’ve learned a lot over the years. We might not be conscious of it, but we’ve got layers and layers of knowing. And when we’re not aware of those things, we reenact them through default.
This came home to me when we were setting up to play with power. The CLA is framed with the expressions of power —moving from power over to power with, supported by power within, power to, and power for (see more here). With inspiration from Cyndi Suarez’s book, “The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics,” we bring power games into the in-person parts of the program.
On the last day of our retreat, my co-lead, Sarah Griffiths, and I were setting the group up to do an exercise that comes out of improv, known as the status switch and that we call the power switch. It’s a way to enact power, or as Cyndi says, actually practice it.
The gist of the activity is this: you have two people playing parts, one which represents a person with more positional power and one with less (think manager and direct report, teacher and student, parent and kid, etc.). They start acting out a situation. One has the power. The other doesn’t. At various times, the audience calls out “Switch!” At that time, the power shifts but not the roles. So suddenly, the part that is assumed to be less powerful has the power and the other part doesn’t. It’s a quick and very embodied experience with power.
In the past, Sarah and I have always shown a video to cue up the activity. Improv actors who know the exercise well and have training in such things (Sarah and I do not) act it out. But we’ve never loved the example we show and have never been able to find a better one. So, this year we decided to jump in with our cohort and model it for them. We promised ourselves we wouldn’t rehearse it so that our own fumbling could help create the brave space that is needed to step into something that ultimately is fun and even silly, but takes most people way out of their comfort zones.
We honored our promise to each other not to practice it or think too much about a situation ahead of time. But I couldn’t help the night before wondering about how I could play with power in the moment and maybe even shift it from the assumed zero sum game that it’s sort of set up to create. I had lots of ideas and was excited to play with some of them. I was almost giddy.
But what happened when the time came for us to model it? I was flustered and felt the pressure of all eyes on us doing something we’ve never done before. I felt the pressure of wanting to provide an example that would be helpful to those who were about to step into themselves. I was aware that this was a moment to teach a lot about power.
So, what did I do? Well, first I fumbled and tried to switch roles instead of power (a common mistake). I was able to shake that off easily because I at least figured I was creating space for mistakes and learning.
But then, I played out my role (we chose teacher and student and I was the teacher) in ways that I had seen and known throughout my life. I grabbed at what I already knew because in the pressure of the moment I couldn’t access all of that great pondering I’d done the night before. In the moment, I was both aware that I wanted to do things differently and also that I couldn’t remember any of the ideas that I’d had.
So, what was an activity on enacting power to me became yet another lesson in the challenge of unlearning and learning. Neither happen just because we have awareness and intellectual understanding of ways to do something different. Both require discomfort, and also support and lots of practice.
And doing that activity ourselves offered up a reframe of what we were actually doing—reenacting power that we know rather than enacting power in a way that we’d choose. We might not like the power that we are reenacting. We might not even be aware that we are reenacting someone else’s version of power. But, it is what we know and thus easy to reach for in moments where action is required.
Over the next six months, the CLA cohort will continue to examine, connect to, and experiment with the different expressions of power. We’ll peel back the layers of it and unlearn some of what we know. We’ll deepen new ways of understanding and enacting it.
And then we’re going to come back to this activity in the closing retreat and see what we can learn from it again. I’m curious to see what might be possible!