Hi {{first_name | friend}},
Last month, I got to host the opening session at Leadership Atelier Barcelona. Obviously the location was pretty special—spring sunshine, Gaudí, all the fresh croquetas a girl could ask for. But it was even better to debut a new workshop I’ve been building the last few months, focused on power mapping.
Power mapping is a tool I learned about years ago in activist and political spaces. The concept is simple: if you want to effect social change around an issue, then you need to understand:
Who in the community currently holds power around that issue
Where they stand on the issue today
What they care about and are motivated by
Who they listen to (and where those people stand and what they care about)
When you start mapping players and relationships visually, the power dynamics become a lot clearer: Who influences whom? Who might be easiest to reach, and what might convince them? Who’s most likely to block your progress, and how might you mitigate that risk?
Photo: Joyce Newrzella / Hatch Conference
I decided to run this workshop because power comes up so often in my work conversations—in coaching calls, in workshops, at Throughline back in January.
Or, more accurately, lack of power comes up.
People tell me about the reorgs and layoffs that are decimating their teams. The execs who swoop in with unreasonable demands and endless fire drills. The product roadmaps that have never even been in the same room as a real user need.
And what can they do about any of that? Not much.
Maybe you’re feeling that way right now: disillusioned with design, destabilized in your career, drained from catering to the whims of short-term thinking and vague, hand-wavey “business needs.”
You’re not wrong for feeling that way. And not to get all girl-with-a-tuba meme on you, but, well. Capitalism has done a number on all of us.
But here’s the thing: power isn’t binary. It’s contextual—you might have a lot of it in some situations, and very little in others. And that’s true for everyone, even people sitting way above you in the org chart.
So while you might not have all the power you crave—the power to reorient the business toward user needs, the power to slow down the slop machine, the power to invest more time in craft or research—that doesn’t mean you’re powerless.
It just means you need to figure out where your particular opportunities to foment change lie right now.
It just means you need to figure out where to start.
That’s why I’ve found power maps so useful for designers. Because they help you see new paths forward when the obvious ones aren’t working. Because they show you who’s already more on your side than you thought.
And maybe most of all—in this era of perpetual exhaustion and overwhelm—they reveal which paths aren’t worth your energy: the people who are least likely to change their minds. The arguments that will never land. And they can help you see how to redirect your efforts—see places where you’ve been banging your head against the same immovable wall, and new places that might be more productive uses of your energy.
As one attendee said after the workshop, “I understood that influence matters, but I hadn't thought carefully about mapping indirect influence paths, who shapes the people who shape decisions.” In my experience, most of us haven’t. And it’s making our already-hard work lives harder.
I’ll be hosting this workshop again (more on that soon). But in the meantime, here’s my suggestion to you: name one thing you’d like to change in your organization. Maybe it’s a project you think is valuable, but no one else seems to care about. Or an approach you’d like to try, if you only had the power to shift the process.
Whatever it is, start mapping out the people who hold sway around that issue right now. Not as jerks blocking your progress, or idiots outside your field who “just don’t get it.” But as actual humans—humans with their own perspectives, their own priorities, their own pain points. How do they see this topic today? What do they care about? Who do they listen to? What opportunities does this reveal?
And then ask yourself: Where does my own power lie right now? Because you might not have power in the way you wish—or as much of it as you’d like. But odds are, there’s something you can shape. Go find it.
— Sara