THE DESTABILISATION OF INSTITUTIONAL POWER AND emergence of collective power has become the conversation of our time. Today, open-source knowledge networks, self-publishers, autonomous producers and micro-entrepreneurs challenge the institutional mainstream in a context where value is co-created, open and distributed.

Those leading are political strategists, entrepreneurs, policy makers and master storytellers — as Geno Church, Greg Cordell, Robbin Phillips, and Spike Jones put it in Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements, the people who are a ‘self-perpetuating force for excitement, ideas, communication and growth’, who disrupt how we build brands, innovate products, and manage reputations.

As organisations evolve from traditional command-and-control hierarchies to agile and co-created ‘ecosystems’, corporate culture is becoming increasingly ‘unscripted’. In this new world, story is the connective tissue that creates vital context for engagement and advocacy.

Yet, survival takes more than hollow corporate storytelling and the voicing of pre-existing institutional demands that lack authenticity and gravitas.

Thousands of HR and business leaders across every country agree. As highlighted by Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report, ‘Effective organisations today are built around highly empowered teams, driven by a new model of management, and led by a breed of globally diverse leaders. They are “different by design”.’

This same source lists companies such as GE and IBM as leading examples of institutions that ‘post leaders in regional centres of excellence, dispensing with the notion that “leaders” only operate out of corporate headquarters’.

Old power versus new power

In the December 2014 Harvard Business Review article ‘Under-standing “new power”’, Australian-born political activist and co-founder of GetUp!, Jeremy Heimans (with co-author Henry Timms) described the beginning of a complex and interesting societal transformation driven by a growing tension between two distinct forces: old power and new power.

Heimans and Timms describe an evolution from consuming to sharing and co-ownership, providing a compelling exposé of how power is shifting in the world. They position ‘old power’ as a currency — closed and inaccessible, held by few, and jealously guarded once gained.

On the other hand, ‘new power’ operates as a ‘current’ — peer-driven, open and participatory, made by many. Like electricity or water, it is most forceful when it surges and the goal isn’t to hoard or control, but to channel it. Importantly, new power taps into people’s growing capacity to participate in ways that go beyond consumption.

Collective powerhouses

With increased demands for autonomy and interdependence from consumers, new challenges and opportunities arise. Importantly, again highlighted by Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016,

hierarchical organisational models aren’t just being turned upside down — they’re being deconstructed from the inside out. Businesses are reinventing themselves to operate as networks of teams to keep pace with the challenges of a fluid, unpredictable world.

A collective powerhouse getting it right is Envato, which acts as a group of digital marketplaces that sell creative assets for web designers. What started out initially as a lifestyle business to enable its founders to work and travel, is, at the time of writing, a company with 1.5 million active buyers and sellers and 6 million community members, operating in eight marketplaces across 200 countries.

Importantly, while Envato’s growth resembles that of a typical tech start-up, its founders know that its future is intrinsically tied to the success of its community. Its online learning service, Tuts+, offers approximately 18,000 free tutorials on graphic design, web design, illustration, code and more. And they are actively engaged in an open dialogue with members to co-create its 2020 company vision. This openness is a stunning example of enterprise co-ownership, and highlights that how Envato innovates and thrives is dependent upon the collective input of its members.

Other high-profile examples of collective powerhouses include Uber and Airbnb — that is, sharing economy social marketplaces that continue to disrupt the traditional taxi and hotel industries worldwide. To contextualise the scale of disruption, in 2015 Airbnb facilitated 30 million stays with guests from 57,000 countries and 150 cities. Likewise, as Uber states on their website, ‘What started as an app to request premium black cars in a few metropolitan areas is now changing the logistical fabric of cities around the world.’

In the wake of such widespread disruption comes vehement resistance — including, in the case of Uber and Airbnb, the legality of their Emergent business models being challenged by governments and the institutional mainstream.

With practitioners across every major industry well outside of their comfort zones — be it through fear of extinction or genuine attempts to forge authentic and sustainable value with stakeholders — what has become crystal clear is that institutional constructs for engagement and innovation are failing.

Institutional power play

Institutions increasingly recognise the benefits of including employees and stakeholders in their growth efforts; however, leveraging that understanding (and underlying demand) requires more than a lacklustre corporate responsibility program or campaign masked in a pretence of care.

As the lines between our real life and work life continue to blur, demands for greater values alignment and autonomy are just the beginning. Putting it bluntly, the old methods and modes of value creation that served institutions for more than a century no longer stack up. Companies are still hard-pressed to identify conscious ways of working that create deeper meaning and value for a workforce that craves intimacy, connection and an opportunity to be part of something greater than the sum of its parts.

Leveraging collective power to create meaningful engagement and innovate for the future demands a new toolset and techniques that bear closer resemblance to grassroots movements and mobilised activism than to the all-too-familiar lacklustre corporate community campaigns. In today’s connected world, value equals intimacy plus connection.

The stakes are high and right now it’s anybody’s game. A clear imperative exists to transform, and yet the paradox of protecting intellectual assets and the bottom line, along with the built-in fear of letting go of control (of legacy systems, product and so on), result in paralysing levels of inertia.

As Gabrielle Dolan, author of Stories for Work, says,

Most organisations feel that it’s too risky to have an open platform where anyone can say anything. They’re still trying to control the messages they put out.

To find out more about Gabrielle, and her tips for business storytelling, go to www.gabrielledolan.com. The following sidebar also develops the idea of storytelling in the new business environment, in a contribution from Michael Margolis.