Solidarity Across Power Differences
Also known as:
Build genuine solidarity with those who have different power positions. Navigate differences without erasing them or defaulting to those with more power.
Build genuine solidarity with those who have different power positions by naming differences directly, creating structures that redistribute voice, and cultivating practices that prevent those with more power from unconsciously dominating.
[!NOTE] Confidence Rating: ★★★ (Established) This pattern draws on Solidarity Practice.
Section 1: Context
Power differences are always present in value-creation systems—between funders and implementers, senior leaders and frontline workers, experienced members and newcomers, those with formal authority and those with embedded knowledge. In healthy commons, these differences are real and often necessary. But they become a source of fragmentation when they’re invisible or when groups with more power unconsciously default to their own frameworks, timelines, and definitions of success.
Across corporate hierarchies, government bureaucracies, activist collectives, and tech teams, a familiar pattern emerges: the people with least formal power withdraw, comply without commitment, or eventually exit. Feedback systems calcify. Learning flows upward only. The system loses access to the real knowledge held by those closest to the work. In feedback-learning domains especially—where knowledge is distributed and correction happens through ongoing sense-making—power differences that go unnamed become deadly to adaptation.
This pattern arises when a system is trying to be genuinely collaborative but hasn’t yet built the structures and practices to prevent unconscious reproduction of power hierarchies. The system is neither rigidly extractive nor freely equal; it’s in the vulnerable middle ground where solidarity could form, but will decay into hidden resentment if power differences aren’t actively stewarded.
Section 2: Problem
The core conflict is Solidarity vs. Differences.
Solidarity wants to say: We are bound together in common purpose. Your flourishing is entangled with mine. This impulse is vital to commons. But it often arrives carrying a hidden assumption: And we will minimize the differences between us.
Those with more power—more resources, formal authority, social capital, or inherited legitimacy—often interpret solidarity as “everyone should think and operate like us.” They may do this with genuine warmth and no awareness of what they’re asking. They set meeting times that work for their schedules. They frame problems in language familiar from their background. They move at their pace. They assume their solution-paths are the obvious ones.
Those with less formal power then face an impossible choice. Perform genuine solidarity by collapsing into the dominant framework (which erases their actual situation). Or insist on their differences (which gets read as disloyalty or obstruction). The tension remains unresolved. Trust decays. The system loses its distributed intelligence.
What breaks: feedback becomes political rather than generative. People withhold real concerns. Knowledge asymmetries widen. The system becomes brittle—dependent on the insight and good intention of those with power, rather than resilient to their absence or mistakes. Learning stops.
Section 3: Solution
Therefore, establish explicit practices for naming power positions, creating structured opportunities for those with less formal power to shape direction, and requiring those with more power to articulate their assumptions before acting on them.
This pattern shifts solidarity from an emotional state (“we all care”) to a structural and relational practice. It says: Your power position is real. Mine is too. Our solidarity is built not by erasing these differences but by moving through them with clear eyes and deliberate design.
The mechanism works in three roots:
First, make power visible. When people in different power positions can name what they actually have access to—formal authority, resources, time, credibility in certain rooms, cultural familiarity with dominant frameworks—the system stops pretending power doesn’t exist. This creates the factual ground where genuine solidarity becomes possible. It’s the difference between “we’re all equal here” (which isolates those experiencing real constraints) and “we occupy different structural positions and we’re designing how to work well across that” (which creates a real problem to solve together).
Second, redistribute voice through structure. Don’t rely on those with less power to “speak up”—that assumes they have permission and safety they often don’t. Instead, design specific moments where their perspective is explicitly solicited and weighted. This might be a formal role in decision-making, a structured feedback protocol, or protected time in meetings. The key is that voice redistribution happens through the commons architecture itself, not as a favor to be granted or withdrawn.
Third, make assumptions visible before action. Those with more power often move quickly on solutions without fully revealing the reasoning underneath. Slow down that moment. Require explicit articulation: Here’s what I’m assuming about the problem, the timeline, what will work, what resources are available. This interrupts unconscious reproduction of dominant frameworks and creates space for alternative reasoning to surface.
In Solidarity Practice traditions, this is sometimes called “transparent stewardship”—the practice of those holding more power explicitly showing their thinking, checking it against the lived experience of others, and being willing to revise it.
Section 4: Implementation
In Corporate Organizations: Before entering a decision process, map who holds which kinds of power—positional authority, budget control, network access, domain expertise, lived experience with the impact. In your next leadership team decision, require each person to state their power position and one assumption they’re making. Then explicitly invite frontline or junior staff into that same articulation space. Document what shifts when the room hears: “I assumed we had three months, but the people doing this work say two weeks is realistic.” This redistributes voice without requiring the powerful to surrender authority—just to slow down and listen before moving.
In Public Service: Establish citizen review panels with genuine decision-weight, not advisory status. Structure these so that people with direct experience of a policy’s impact (housing-insecure residents, undocumented workers, disabled people using accessible services) sit in the same feedback loop as program managers and elected officials. The power difference doesn’t vanish, but it becomes visible: You make the final call. And you’re hearing directly why your assumption about timeline or accessibility won’t work in practice. In government, this also means building feedback loops that interrupt the tendency of upper-level officials to make decisions based on what other officials think, rather than what constituents actually need.
In Activist Movements: Solidarity Across Power Differences becomes urgent when movements include both long-term organizers and newly radicalised participants, both people with resources and people working without pay, both those with time and those juggling survival. Create rotating roles in facilitation and strategy so power doesn’t calcify around those who showed up first. More radically: build decision-making structures where those most affected by police, precarity, or extraction have explicit veto power over tactics that could harm them. Name it directly: “This tactic will have different consequences for undocumented people than for citizens. Here’s how that gets decided.”
In Tech Products: When building features, create feedback loops with actual users who occupy different power positions relative to the product—power users and occasional users, people paying for the tool and people whose data is harvested, those comfortable with the UI paradigm and those finding it opaque. Don’t gather this in surveys; build it into your design process as ongoing co-design with people who experience different constraints. When your product team assumes everyone has reliable internet, or reads English as first language, or has hands that work a standard keyboard, you’ve defaulted to dominant power. Interrupt that assumption before coding. Have the person with marginal access to your tech sit in design meetings and articulate what you’re missing.
Section 5: Consequences
What Flourishes:
Real feedback enters the system. When people know their power position will be named and their perspective actively solicited, they share the knowledge they actually hold rather than filtering it through what they think you want to hear. This is the first precondition for learning. Decisions improve because they’re built on more complete information. Trust deepens—not because conflict disappears, but because it becomes workable rather than hidden. People with less formal power experience themselves as genuinely contributing to direction, not just executing someone else’s vision. This sustains their commitment and generates better implementation because they understand why something matters, not just what to do. Over time, the system develops adaptive capacity because it’s not dependent on the insight of those at the top—distributed intelligence becomes the norm.
What Risks Emerge:
This pattern carries moderate resilience risk (3.0 score). The primary danger is that power-naming becomes performative ritual rather than structural reality. You hold a meeting where everyone says their power position, then proceed exactly as the most powerful person wanted anyway. The performance of solidarity actually deepens cynicism. Without ongoing structures that genuinely redistribute voice and slow down decision-making, this pattern hollow out. Also watch for backlash: those accustomed to unconscious power may experience explicit power-naming as accusation or threat. They may resist structures that slow their decision-making. If not addressed, this creates visible conflict that can fragment the system. Finally, because this pattern sustains vitality without necessarily generating new adaptive capacity, it can become routinised and rigid—the structures ossify into boxes to check rather than living practices. Regular redesign is essential.
Section 6: Known Uses
Participatory Budgeting in Public Service (Brazil, NYC): Port Alegre’s participatory budgeting process, beginning in 1989, explicitly named the power difference between municipal government and residents. Government officials kept decision-making authority but created structured assemblies where residents directly discussed priorities and voted on allocations. The power difference remained visible and real, but it was stewarded through design. What shifted: residents gained access to budget information previously held only by officials. Officials gained understanding of why residents prioritized differently than they would have assumed. The feedback loop became genuinely bidirectional. The pattern didn’t erase government power; it made that power answerable to distributed knowledge.
The Highlander Center’s Residential Popular Education (Activist Tradition): For seventy years, Highlander has gathered grassroots organizers, civil rights leaders, and people most affected by extraction into residential learning spaces. The explicit practice: those with most formal power (academics, senior organizers) are not the primary teachers. Instead, the knowledge held by people living in struggle—what actually works in their communities, what’s being missed by outsiders—is positioned as primary. Facilitators slow down expertise-sharing to create space for this knowledge. Power positions are named: Some of us have academic credentials that give us certain kinds of authority. Some of us have survived things that give us other kinds. We need both, and we’re going to structure this so both are heard. The pattern generates fierce loyalty and sustained movement capacity because people experience themselves as genuinely stewarding direction, not just being educated.
Zappos’ Holacracy Experiments and Reversals (Tech/Corporate): When Zappos attempted radical power redistribution through Holacracy, the company created structures where formal hierarchy was flattened and roles replaced positions. What emerged: power still existed, but became invisible again because it was no longer explicitly named. People with particular charisma, network access, or comfort with process dominance wielded power without accountability. The pattern failed because it tried to erase power differences rather than steward them. The lesson: naming power differences is more resilient than attempting to dissolve them.
Section 7: Cognitive Era
In an age where artificial intelligence mediates feedback and learning, this pattern faces new pressures and new possibilities.
New Risk: AI systems trained on data generated by those with more power will systematize and amplify power differences at scale. An algorithm trained on decisions made by senior leadership, without exposure to frontline knowledge, will learn to replicate dominant frameworks. It will do so with false objectivity—the appearance of neutrality that makes power difference invisible again. In tech products especially, if your AI recommendations are built only on majority user behavior or on data from early adopters, you’ve encoded power difference into the model itself.
New Leverage: Distributed intelligence systems (federated learning, edge AI) create possibility for genuine knowledge synthesis across power positions without requiring centralized data collection. You can build feedback loops where frontline workers, users with marginal access, and those with formal authority contribute to model improvement without surrendering their data to a central authority. This requires deliberate design: explicitly structuring which feedback shapes which parts of the model, making visible whose data is being used, and building in points where different groups can revise or veto directions the AI is taking.
Structural Shift: The pattern becomes more critical and more urgent. As AI increasingly mediates decisions, the human practice of naming power differences and redistributing voice becomes the only counterweight to algorithmic reproduction of hierarchy. You cannot train your way out of this through data alone. You need living practices where people in different power positions together decide: What should this system optimize for? Whose interests are embedded in these metrics? This moves Solidarity Across Power Differences from nice-to-have practice to core infrastructure for AI governance in commons-based systems.
Section 8: Vitality
Signs of Life:
Feedback flows in all directions, and notably from those with less formal power without them filtering through fear of consequence. You hear “that won’t work because…” from frontline staff, and senior leaders slow down to understand why. People in different power positions reference each other’s contributions in decisions: “We tried that, but Maya (who works with the population most affected) pointed out it creates a barrier for…” Decisions that favor the powerful are visibly slowed or revised when those with less power articulate real costs. The commons generates new solutions that none of the powerful groups would have thought of alone—a sign that distributed knowledge is actually being woven in. People stay, and they’re engaged not just compliant.
Signs of Decay:
Power-naming becomes a box-checking ritual with no structural consequence. “Everyone gets to speak” but decisions proceed exactly as the most powerful person wanted. Feedback from those with less power is listened to politely then ignored, creating a new form of invisibility. People stop offering real feedback because they’ve learned it doesn’t shift anything. The structures meant to redistribute voice become predictable and routinised—people perform participation without genuine stake. Those with less power remain and comply, but commitment hollows out. Decisions get slower without getting better. The most astute people with less formal power leave, taking their knowledge with them.
When to Replant:
When you notice feedback becoming performance rather than learning, pause the entire feedback architecture and redesign it with the people it’s meant to serve. Don’t fix the form; rebuild the function together. If you see decay after 18–24 months of a practice you thought was working, that’s the time to ask: What assumptions did we build in that no longer hold? Whose power has shifted? What have we stopped noticing? Replanting means going back to the root: making power visible again.