6 ideas
Power in an organisation flows to whoever controls a source of uncertainty that matters for others' goals, such as expertise, relations with the environment, control of information, or use of the rules. The more unpredictable an actor's behaviour is to others, and the more critical that unpredictability is, the more power that actor holds.
Power is not an attribute someone owns. It is an unbalanced exchange relation in which each party tries to keep its own behaviour open while making the other's behaviour predictable. The balance depends on each side's margin of freedom, meaning its ability to refuse what the other asks.
Actors rarely have clear objectives and are never fully rational. Their behaviour is still always active and strategic, aimed at preserving or enlarging their room to manoeuvre within the constraints they face. Behaviour that looks irrational becomes intelligible once you reconstruct the game the actor is playing and the resources they have in it.
Beneath the formal chart, an organisation is a structured set of games that regulates relations among actors through relatively stable mechanisms. It is a human construct, contingent and not natural, and it holds cooperation together despite divergent interests. The real system must be discovered empirically, because it cannot be read off the official structure.
Top-down change that redesigns structures or rules without understanding the existing power games gets absorbed, diverted, or blocked. Actors defend the uncertainty zones that give them leverage, and they can do so successfully. Change is a collective learning process in which actors must discover and acquire new capacities and new games; it cannot be decreed.
First, map each actor's stakes, constraints, resources, and strategies, and identify which uncertainties each one controls. Then work back up from these strategies to reconstruct the system of games that makes them rational and that they in turn sustain. The two steps correct each other: strategies only make sense within the system, and the system only exists through strategies.