If I ever write a memoir of my life in New Brunswick, I will title it Left At The Irving.
In this small eastern Canadian province, Irving is everything.
It is people, specifically an extended family of wealthy industrialists, now in their fifth generation.
It is hundreds of products and services, including toilet paper, motor oil, radio stations, trucking fleets, rail lines and ships.
And Irving is a multitude of places, as the largest private landholder in the Maritimes with millions of acres of forests, fields and coastline; processing plants; office buildings; and the largest refinery in Canada with gas stations that boast of having the cleanest bathrooms in the land (tis true).
When I arrived in New Brunswick in 1997 to work as a business reporter for the Irving-owned Telegraph Journal, I heard a lot about Irving, including when asking for directions.
Inevitably instructions almost always include some version of ‘go a couple of clicks down the road, then left at the Irving.’
Because of that ubiquity, most people will say Irving’s most significant impact on New Brunswick is economic, but I disagree.
I say it’s culture, notably how people move through and around power.
Over the past two decades, as I’ve written about the resource economy, tax policies, and community development, I’ve heard New Brunswick residents express a mixture of respect for the Irvings’ accomplishments and resentment towards business outcomes they view as unfair but feel powerless to influence.
That’s the description of a very traditional power dynamic, one I would describe as pragmatically self-interested.
When it benefits corporate self-interest to align with the community’s interests, it does; when those interests don’t align, self-interest trumps community interest.
That power dynamic is not unique to the Irving/New Brunswick relationship; it’s just uniquely concentrated here.
We hear similar comments about Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Bay Street, Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing, Hollywood, Bollywood, tech bros, girl bosses and anyone else who seeks to concentrate economic, political or organizational power.
It’s a model of power that adheres to the core centralizing, or self-interested, values of a hierarchy:
- Control routes and resources to conserve energy and guard against threats;
- Command power by pushing information and instructions out from the few to the many;
- Order those instructions to ensure everything has its place and there’s a place for everything; and,
- Fixed roles and responsibilities to create clear boundaries of thought, deed and direction.
It’s a stark list, but don’t read it as a condemnation of hierarchical structures. That would make me a hypocrite because while hierarchies are the preferred methodology for top-down leadership, it is also how we parent.
Hierarchies are ubiquitous. They are everything, everywhere, all at once.
And now, so too are networks, which adhere to a very different set of values.
Networks derive power via:
- Access to infinite resources and pathways;
- Exchange of resources between and by the many;
- Speed of exchange to accelerate access; and,
- Mobility to lower and eliminate boundaries.
The certainty of hierarchies is giving way to the flexibility of networks, and we haven’t figured out how to make it all work, to shift our organizational processes, activities and outputs to reflect this new blended reality.
The big question we must ask ourselves is this: how do we retain the values of safety and security central to hierarchies as we increase our access to the multi-channel power and speed of networks?
Thankfully, solving for complexity doesn’t have to be complicated.
Sometimes it just means adapting familiar tools, such as the OG of strategic planning, the SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
It’s a decent tool, but its focus is wrong; the analysis is self-interested, identifying an organization’s strengths and weaknesses and categorizing external forces as either opportunities or threats, friends or foes.
My solution is to reframe the question, focusing on the effect an organization’s actions have on its network, which I define as the people and organizations you work with, sell to and seek to influence.
I call it the 4H Shared Benefits Analysis, and it asks the following: how do your current or proposed actions help or hinder, heal or harm both you and your network?
There is no either/or; it’s purposefully and/and.
This exercise recognizes that accessing the power of a network cannot be achieved via control and command; it is cultivated through an exchange rooted in trust, which might require acknowledging past wrongs, even if you are not responsible for the original scars.
That’s a big lift, which is why no single entity should shoulder the task alone, no matter how powerful it may perceive itself to be.
To help and heal our organizations and the people we work with, serve and influence, we need access to the shared power that flows through networks via the people, processes and places that define it.
