Energy, Power, and Change in a Community Ecosystem
Overcoming systemic resistance to change
[On further reflection, I have concluded that, while much of the material below is correct, the overall framing of the issue of power and change in an ecosystem is flawed and so, therefore, are the conclusions. You can find a better analysis in this later article.]
When I first began to explore resilience science, I wrote that the purpose of ecosystem structures and, indeed, of the ecosystem itself “is flow – the flow or circulation of money or information or resources or power.”
I had some doubts about including power in that list. It’s easy to visualize flows of information and resources; power is trickier. Nevertheless, it felt important to include. In the end, everything that flows through the network of an ecosystem can be thought of as energy, and what is power if not just a particular kind of potential energy in human networks?
So, with some trepidation, I want to take a run at it here. I won’t try to analyze power itself or how to obtain it. Lots has been written about that and I have nothing special to add. What I want to look at here is how power relates to the functioning of a community ecosystem and especially to attempts to change it.
First, though, we need to make a brief excursion into the purpose of the “energy” that flows through an ecosystem.
What is Energy For?
The relevant concept here is that of an equilibrium system, a system that maintains a stable state over time. Some systems in equilibrium require no influx of energy because they’re essentially dead. A system like that may or may not have structure – a heap of dust does not, while a crystal does – but if it does, it’s a dead kind of structure. It does not evolve.
Now consider a living system like a meadow. It has lots of structures that interact in complex ways: grasses and other plants, water circulation systems, animals, birds, soils, insects, and more. But maintaining those structures and interactions comes at a cost: there must be constant input of energy in the form of resources like sun and water without which the meadow will die. With them, however, a meadow can maintain its structural integrity over a long period of time. Individual components emerge, transform, and die, but the overall patterns persist.
Community ecosystems are similar. They need extra energy to be able to survive and evolve, energy in the form of environmental inputs like sun, rain, and natural resources plus social inputs like money, information, and imported goods. As long as that flow of energy continues, communities too can persist for a long time.
Recall that the second pillar of systems science is the role of energy “in organizational emergence, growth, and development.” Energy is what enables ecosystems to persist, to maintain their structures even in the face of changes, as long as the disturbances aren’t too extreme.
That, in fact, is the key characteristic of an equilibrium ecosystem: it tends to recover and persist even after a disturbance.
It’s an excellent quality for the system’s survivability. But it’s also a barrier to change.
The Negative Side of Resilience
It’s a very human tendency to look for a culprit when systems produce undesirable outcomes. We gravitate to a narrative that sees some particular person or group or law or process as responsible for what is happening. Get rid of that and all will be well. The implication for power is that we just need the power to get rid of the responsible party or to change the relevant law, a one-time push to accomplish the change.
But if we are dealing with an equilibrium ecosystem, that approach doesn’t work. Once the “culprit” is out of the way, a hundred other people and processes will collectively operate to restore the system to equilibrium, that is, to working the way it worked before, often without anyone even being aware.
Indeed, a 2023 paper1 on the ineffectiveness of interventions in the criminal legal system notes that social systems have “stabilizing forces” that drive them back to where they started. Earl Mu’min Simms, a community advocate in San Francisco, called them “immune systems,” which I think better captures the way they function in an ecosystem.2 They kick in as soon as something threatens the system’s equilibrium and can engage many different ecosystem elements.
I wrote about the subtle mechanisms involved in 2020 and again more recently in describing what Dr. Dwight Mullen saw in “post”-colonial Nigeria. And in every large organization I’ve been in that tried to make a major change, I’ve observed that compensatory behaviors throughout the system nearly always cause things to revert even when everyone seems to support the change.
Nonviolence theory offers the related concept of “pillars of support” that prop up unjust systems. Proponents of nonviolent direct action emphasize the fact that authoritarians’ dependence on them make their systems inherently unstable – remove those supports and they become much easier to topple. But for sustainable change it is at least as important to undertake a constructive program to build a new set of supports for the just system intended to replace the unjust one.
What the ecosystem frame gives us is a more dynamic picture of how such supports actually work as well as clues about how to think about change and the role of power in creating it.
Principles of Power and Change
Three principles stand out to me.
The first is that we have to expect the immune system.
Importantly, we should also expect that impulses to revert may not look like direct opposition. “Urgency” is a classic example of a reversion mechanism that appears unrelated to the original change. We may all agree that we want to operate in a new way, but time is short or the political situation is fraught and so “just this once” circumstances dictate that we take the easier, more familiar path. Of course, “just this once” turns out to happen on a regular basis.
So power is needed to resist taking that easier path. It may also be needed to prompt investigation into other parts of the ecosystem that tend to produce emergencies, making the organization reactive and thus susceptible to the urgency mechanism.
The second principle is that ecosystem change requires at least two distinct types of power.
The power required to make an initial change is the more familiar kind. When there is energy for reform and someone wields power to bring the change about, it tends to be visible: people hear about the dramatic departure, the new leader, the new law. They also then tend to assume that the change is done.
However, once the new configuration is established, it also has to be maintained. That requires energy, of course – the new configuration has to be properly resourced if it is to persist – but it also requires a different kind of power, one that is less dramatic and less visible. It is power that is continuously available to respond when the system tries to revert, such as leadership backing to resist urgency’s easier path or rental agencies’ access to legal help with landlords charging tenants illegal late fees after Hurricane Helene.
Which leads us to the third principle, that powering change in an ecosystem requires building a healthy network of relationships and flows.
The forces that drive a system to revert tend to be distributed and diffuse. It may be possible to anticipate patterns, but it’s rarely possible to predict exactly where resistive forces will appear or who will play the resisting role. Thus a strong network is needed that can quickly alert power and bring it to bear when needed.
Fortunately, the effort needed to build such a network is not really different from that needed to build a healthy ecosystem generally, one that exhibits the ten key characteristics of a healthy flow network. That’s a critical feature of ecosystems for reform, that they offer the possibility of creating virtuous cycles to counter the ubiquitous vicious ones.
Of course, these three principles only improve the likelihood that power can be effective, if used. Whether it is used depends on people’s willingness to use it. My hope is that we can better prepare leaders to embrace their role in leading change by improving their understanding of how it actually works.
Links & Thoughts
Contending with power in philanthropy. A recent article in Inside Philanthropy argues that philanthropic organizations cannot both serve their mission and remain neutral in the face of the onslaught by the Trump administration. They must help people build civic power.
An ecosystem to build power. Relatedly, this 2021 report from the Center for the Study of Social Policy for The California Endowment offers a conceptual framework for helping the ecosystem of community members and local, state, and national organizations to build power to achieve policy changes, system improvements, and electoral goals.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.
Stevenson, Megan, Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World (May 11, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4445710.
Earl Mu’min Simms is a community leader in San Francisco working at the intersection of homelessness and criminal justice. I met him at the Safety + Justice Challenge annual convening in Houston in May 2024.