Diagramming Power vs. Agreement

By design, nearly all modern corporations concentrate power in the hands of a few people (e.g., a board of directors), who then carefully delegate specific pieces of that power through a executive structure to selected individuals. In traditional hierarchies, those executives can split up their piece of power further and delegate it to managers under their own control, who can in turn delegate their pieces to other, and so on.

We memorialize this pattern in our classic organizational charts. The CEO sits at the top of a pyramid that cascades down through any number of managers. Anyone familiar with complexity research will note that this is a self-similar, "fractal" pattern -- the big pieces are made up of littler pieces that have the same shape and character.

At their heart, these charts answer the question, "Ultimately, who controls whom?" Most well-managed corporations don't rely on the exercise of this power to function. That usually leads to dysfunction. But it's always there, available for use. And everyone in such an organization knows it.

While everyone recognizes a traditional organizational chart and what it means, there is no comparable standard for diagramming an agreement-based organization. One approach might be to create a chart that answers the question, "Ultimately, who agrees with whom?"

Let's start with the simplest possible diagram. Juan and Esme agree. The two circles are the two individuals and the line between them is their agreement. Alternatively, we could show them as two circles of the same color, with the color signifying their agreement.

But what if they have two agreements? Two lines? Two colors? That could get messy pretty fast. What happens if a third person, Bob, enters the picture, who agrees with Juan on one matter and Esme and another, and both of them, along with Trang on a third?

What happens if an agreement gets formalized into a corporation, for example, a membership organization. One way to depict it would be to draw the members inside the agreement. Another way would be to have them link to it. The latter has the advantage of showing both the membership agreement (blue line) and the incorporation agreement (red box).

The bottom line is that those of us trying to make the design of agreement-based organization or rigorous are still making this up as we go along. Personally, I've changed my preferred tools several times over the years. I've found that some approaches make more sense in some situations and others in others. On this site you'll find quite a variety of diagrams. They are part of the exploration of possibilities. Most are currently two-dimensional, which is a serious limitation in many cases. It's the best that I can do at the moment, until some more effective tools are developed.