When I wrote recently about power in ecosystems, I made a mistake.1 I was thinking within a kind of “enforcement” paradigm, one that tries to use power to counteract the system’s immune system and resist its tendency to revert. That rarely works. Changes tend to be short-lived, if they happen at all. They aren’t resilient.
It’s a common mistake. At root it arises from conceiving ourselves as separate from what we are trying to change: we are changing it. This subject-object mentality is deeply ingrained in our western ways of thinking, but it’s not how things actually work. We are part of the system, in relationship with the whole and with all of its parts.
Most importantly, we are an integral part of producing the system’s results, which makes us poor candidates as enforcers. Failure to understand this dooms most change efforts.
What Does It Mean To “Change the System”?
It’s easy to change an ecosystem. Do anything and the system will change. That’s because it’s not a mechanical thing that requires every part to be in a particular, fixed configuration – it’s alive and evolving. Change is part of what it is.
What we usually mean when we talk about “changing the system” is that we want to change the results it produces. That is much harder.
Which brings me back to power and my mistake.
Enforcement is about using power to resist the system’s stabilizing forces. Unfortunately, social systems tend to be quite effective at dealing with such resistance, at coercing us back into the “proper” behavior or neutralizing our challenge.
This is hardly a new idea. In Capital Karl Marx pointed out that individual capitalists’ willingness to resist the drive to increase worker exploitation matters not at all for the system as a whole since a “coercive law of competition” forces them to shape up or cease to exist (as capitalists, generally by going out of business). In Supercapitalism Robert Reich told an updated version of this story about corporate lobbying: every CEO hates the never-ending fight for advantage in regulation, but those who fail to engage soon find themselves out on their ears.
It’s not just capitalists. It plays out everywhere, from nonprofits that have to play the funding game to politicians engaged in endless political fundraising to almost any leader trying to change an established organization’s culture. Individuals are outmatched by systems.
A Lesson from Movements
David LaMotte highlights the solution in his TEDx talk about creating social change: individual heroes don’t change the world, movements do. But what makes a movement effective?
Movements aren’t just about accumulating large numbers of people. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mark Beissinger both pointed out recently2 on
’s Civic Forum that, while the massive protests taking place against the Trump administration’s actions have their value, they won’t change anything by themselves. The power of those millions of people is too diffuse to be effective. At some point it must be focused and organized, then used for action.That’s what a movement does. It’s an organized restructuring of the system, in two steps. First, people or organizations are organized into a coordinated group that is able to act together, transforming their diffuse individual bits of energy and power into a collective with real power, opening new dynamic possibilities. Second, that new entity begins to act, applying its power to shift the ecosystem toward a new and better equilibrium for its stakeholders.
That’s how effective large-scale movements work, but the same principles apply at the scale of a community.
Think, for example, of a union or a coalition of downtown business owners. Individually, workers and business owners are relatively powerless to shift how things work in a large company, a city, or a regional industry. But as organized groups, they can often accomplish wonders.
A different kind of example: I recently read a book on the history of African-American cooperative economic practices and about halfway through it dawned on me that co-ops are the same kind of thing: the creation of a new entity in a local economic ecosystem designed to shift power in order to address a market failure or to help people manage economic change.
Some forms may seem surprising. I’m participating in a local community organizing experiment right now: the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care (CoC), which recently introduced a new governance model for local efforts to address homelessness. We don’t do much marching with signs and bullhorns, given that CoC members include local governments and law enforcement in addition to homelessness service agencies, churches, and residents. My personal “activism” involves exciting actions like revising the Release of Information form that agency clients sign.
But it is community organizing nonetheless. The initial formation of the CoC was less a way to shift power than an effort to align governance of the homelessness services system more closely with its actual sources of power. That sets things up for the critical organizing steps: to get the CoC membership aligned on key goals so their power can be focused, then to improve how the homelessness services ecosystem works internally and to help shift the dynamics of the larger ecosystem toward better addressing the underlying causes of homelessness.
Principles of Power and Resilient Change
There’s an interesting resonance between the community organizing two-step, internal organizing followed by external action, and what we observed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene,3 that “the organizations and communities that fared best … were those who were (a) internally organized and deeply connected to those they serve and (b) well-connected with other organizations and communities.”4 The resonance reflects the fact that both are rooted in the way that healthy, resilient ecosystems function.
That insight also leads to a modified set of principles for thinking about power in system change.
Real Power Lies in Structures and Relationships
First, I think it tells us something important about lasting system change, namely that it’s a mistake to think that resilient system change in any system is possible without new configurations of power. Existing power can certainly play a role in instigating change, but sustainability requires new configurations around new power centers or, at minimum, reconfiguration of the relationships between existing powers.
There’s no simple formula for how to do this, of course. But it certainly does confirm what any decent organizer will tell you: that system change has to begin with an analysis of power. Where does it currently lie? What sources might be organized to create new centers? How should those new centers be deployed?
Expect the Immune System
The second principle remains from my earlier formulation, although I might expand it to: “Expect the immune system and expect to find yourself part of it.”
The big change is in the response. Facing a system that constantly adjusts to subvert our changes means we too will need to constantly adjust, rather than just try to beat back the forces pushing us to revert. That means that we must get curious about these stabilizing forces, try to understand where they come from and how they operate so that we can respond creatively.
Thus the response to this principle is to center learning and iteration, keeping our intentions in mind so that the work of change becomes an iterative series of experiments in navigating towards a goal.
The System IS the Governance
Which brings me back to my mistake. Who is doing the learning? Who is doing the adjusting? We are, of course, meaning everything and everyone in the system.
The hardest part of shifting to ecosystem thinking is to break out of that subject-object paradigm and to understand that everything is we. The reality is that governing the system is a function of the whole system. The goal of a change effort is to create and adjust power through organizing in order to shift how that governing operates by building a new healthy network of relationships and flows of information and resources.
Links & Thoughts
Arthur Holmes: A History of (Western) Philosophy. Speaking of western thinking, it’s valuable to understand how we got here if we are to see these paradigms for what they are and create new ones. I stumbled last year on these videos of Arthur Holmes’ 1992-3 history of philosophy class at Wheaton College. He does a good job of providing both historical context – what particular problems were philosophers contending with and what tools were available to them – and how their work relates to questions and problems in our time. Obviously somewhat dated, but still highly recommended.
Community Beyond Resources. This article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review echoes the insight of Marc Dones that I talked about last time that effective solutions to homelessness must invest beyond individuals to include their networks. The article notes that “building stronger pathways out of homelessness means prioritizing not only shelter, but also belonging. In this sense, if housing is the foundation, relationships are the thing that keeps people in homes.”
Effective Opposition and Civic Engagement with Erica Chenoweth. Tomorrow’s session of The Civic Forum is with Erica Chenoweth, an expert on social movements and nonviolent resistance. They will speak about the state of the American pro-democracy movement and lessons for effective opposition. Chenoweth is a co-author of the Harvard Kennedy School white paper on resisting autocracy in the U.S. from which I’ve drawn some key ideas. If you miss the live conversation, it should show up a few days later on the Archive page.
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.
This newsletter is where I work out what I think. Inevitably I will sometimes think my way to something that, on further thought, turns out not to be what I think. Sigh.
Both conversations are available on the Archive page of the Civic Forum site.
I originally named this in my reflections on Laura Lengnick’s book on Resilient Agriculture and connected it to resilience science in the article immediately following.
A Resilient Ecosystems Approach to Investing in Community Impact, DeepWeave WNC white paper, July, 2025.
I think it is un-American to admit mistakes, especially in thinking