There are fundamentally two types of power in any community. One is direct & hierarchical, the other indirect & social.

Hierarchical power is hard governance — there’s a mayor, an admin, a boss, a moderator, a board, a council, an HOA. They build process & systems and have access to the buttons & mechanisms that make things go and can formally recognize or penalize you.

Social power is softly persuasive — it’s that person everyone seems to know, the socialite whose parties everyone wants an invite to, the commenter everyone +1s, the person whose words change minds to include or ostracize. They channel vibes & know how to use them.

Both are happening all the time, everywhere. Lean too hard into hierarchy and you’re a despot; lean too hard on social and you’re manipulative. 

For the many years I co-led Icrontic with my friend Brian, we were both perhaps 80-20 in our respective uses of power — him leaning social, me leaning hierarchical. We balanced each other well, and the community mostly thrived.

Fast forward many years, and we were already running out of steam when grief came for us. It had stopped being fun and become toil, and the work was piling up. When Brian decided to formally step back, I asked him for a bit longer, knowing I could not fill a leadership void quickly. But in designing a solution, I made a few critical errors.

The core problem we set out to address was the emotional labor of Icrontic — the part I could not possibly shoulder alone. Brian and I quickly agreed on folks who were capable of that, and with the guidance of the community we created a Board to serve as a backstop for making empathetic & progressive decisions about how to respond to social challenges that regularly crop up in any community.

That wasn’t an error; 10/10 no notes. The error was that I thought that was the whole problem to solve and the rest would work itself out. I suppose it did, just not as I hoped.

It wasn’t just the division of emotional labor that needed addressing. In creating a Board, we had shored up the hierarchical power of Icrontic without addressing the social power. Frankly, I hadn’t the strength to do both, so I started with the part I had the energy to work on. And so the social power suddenly found itself outside the new hierarchy which created resentment & grievance.

They didn’t have the words for describing what was happening, so they repeated vague claims about “friend governments” for which they had no deeper explanation. The explanation in this framing is clearer: One side of the power equation was out of balance and they didn’t like the vibe. The board was fully transparent: No one had the bandwidth to jump into the social power vacuum that Brian left. We simply hadn’t solved for that because we hadn’t identified the problem.

What happened next seems obvious in retrospect. The folks who thrived on hierarchical order drew closer, and the folks who thrived on social order drifted. Our social glue dried out a bit and its hold loosened, and folks found new reasons to withdraw from the gaps that formed. When the sides inevitably clashed once more, a schism resulted and a few folks on the social power side loudly left or quietly withdrew later.

The problem boils down to this: You can’t then rebalance the system by simply telling social power “you were right, do what you want.”

Power without accountability is a gross failure mode of social power we’ve all seen play out. A lack of accountability only breeds more conflict and is at the root of many community issues. Some folks who withdrew created far more friction & stress than they contributed elsewhere.

We made tremendous forward strides on the hierarchical side that need to continue to evolve to address those problems constructively, not be torn back down. What we need is someone with social capital who isn’t burned out, willing to work within structure, willing to be out front & talk to everyone, and is still optimistic & hopeful about the power of a little social club to change peoples’ lives.

If that person exists, I’d love to find them and help them succeed. If they don’t… I’ll once again grind on a thing I am the worst at until I get it right one day. Hajime.