Who really holds power in your organisation?

A digital transformation project is launched. Senior management has signed off on the strategy, the budget is approved, consultants are engaged. And yet, six months later, nothing moves. Resistance is diffuse, delays accumulate, steering meetings go round in circles.

Why? Because the official power map, the org chart, does not correspond to the real power map. And it is the real map that determines what actually happens in an organisation.

Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg formalised this with decisive precision in L'acteur et le système, published in 1977: 'An actor's power depends on their ability to control an uncertainty that affects others.'

The zone of uncertainty: where power resides

Crozier identifies four types of zones of uncertainty that underpin power in any organisation.

Control of a specific expertise: whoever knows what others do not know, who masters a technique or critical knowledge for the organisation's functioning, holds real power regardless of their hierarchical position.

Control of information and external relationships: whoever manages interfaces with the outside, customers, regulators, partners, controls a strategic information flow.

Control of organisational rules: paradoxically, whoever knows the rules perfectly can use them to control others' room for manoeuvre, by applying them at will, or not applying them.

Control of internal communications: in a complex organisation, whoever regulates information flows between different parts exerts considerable power over representations and decisions.

« Power is not only hierarchical, it circulates throughout the organisation, through individuals, groups, structures and symbols. »

— Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (1986)

The case of IT experts in digital transformation

Back to our digital transformation project. Senior management wants rapid, centralised implementation. Department heads fear losing autonomy. And internal IT experts suddenly become indispensable, because they hold the technical mastery on which the project's success depends.

These experts, who may not appear in the inner circle of the leadership team, have become the most powerful actors in the transformation. Not through formal authority, but because they control the critical zone of uncertainty: technical feasibility.

This reversal of hierarchical relationships is commonplace in any large-scale transformation. The leader who does not see it, who thinks formal authority is enough to move things forward, will systematically encounter resistance they do not understand, and will often attribute it, wrongly, to communication or willpower failures.

Crozier's conclusion is lapidary: 'Power is built in action and interaction, not in org charts.'

Navigating the political system intelligently

Understanding the political model of the organisation is not an invitation to cynicism. It is a prerequisite for any successful transformation.

Mintzberg put it clearly: 'Organisational politics is the art of using power and influence to achieve objectives not necessarily recognised by the formal system.' Political behaviours are not anomalies, they are constitutive of organisational life. The question is not to eliminate them, but to understand them in order to navigate better.

For a leader driving transformation, this requires three things.

First, map the real political system before acting: identify who controls which zones of uncertainty, who benefits from change and who is threatened by it, which informal alliances structure behaviours.

Second, build coalitions around key actors, including, and especially, those not in formal bodies. A transformation that does not bring along technical experts, front-line managers and informal opinion leaders is a transformation that fails.

Third, as Crozier and Friedberg concluded: 'To understand power is to understand the organisation.' This systemic competence is one of the most valuable a leader can develop, and one of the least taught in business schools.