Three faces of power

I am convinced that we need to change existing power structures in order to achieve organizational democracy. An example are the struggles we see with scaling agile software development to the whole organization. This is ultimately a question of changing the power distribution.

Kenneth E. Boulding defines the three faces of power as:

1. Threat Power – “Do something I want or I’ll do something you don’t want”
2. Exchange Power – “Give me something I want and I’ll give you something you want”
3. Integrative Power – “I’m going to do what I believe is right, something authentic, and we will end up closer”