Power-With Is Not the Same as Flat: NVC and the Myth of the Non-Hierarchical Organization
- NVC Rising Platform Desk
- 20 hours ago
- 7 min read
You've been in that meeting. The one where someone says, "We don't have hierarchy here — everyone's voice matters equally," and then one person's voice clearly matters more. You watch the room adjust, read the cues, defer. Nobody names it. The meeting ends. The dynamic stays.
If you've spent any time in intentional communities, cooperatives, activist circles, or "self-organizing" teams, you've lived this. The org chart disappears. The power doesn't.
This isn't a failure of intention. It's a failure of framework. And it's exactly where Miki Kashtan's reading of NVC — and one framework she's built around it — has something genuinely useful to say.
The Flat Organization Isn't the Problem. Your Theory of Power Is.
Here's the assumption hiding inside most "non-hierarchical" designs: if we remove formal authority, we remove domination. So we get rid of job titles. We use consensus. We rotate facilitation. We build a circle instead of a pyramid.
And then someone with more social capital, more confidence, more years in the room, or simply more volume starts shaping decisions. The decisions still flow one direction. The circle becomes a hierarchy with better aesthetics.
Marshall Rosenberg named the deeper issue decades ago. He argued that life-alienating communication — the language of "should," "have to," "you're wrong," and "because I said so" — both stems from and supports domination systems. The problem isn't the org chart. It's the internalized logic of power-over: that someone must comply, someone must enforce, someone must win.
Removing the chart doesn't remove the logic. It just makes it harder to see.
Power-Over and Power-With Are Not a Spectrum
NVC distinguishes between two fundamentally different relationships to power. Power-over uses demands, compliance, punishment, and the implicit threat of exclusion to produce outcomes. Power-with operates through genuine requests, shared needs-discovery, and agreements people actually make rather than submit to.
This distinction didn't originate with Rosenberg. Organizational theorist Mary Parker Follett introduced it roughly a century ago. Kashtan credits Follett explicitly — and extends the frame into something more rigorous than "be collaborative."
The critical insight: power-with is not the absence of structure. It's a different theory of what structure is for.
A power-with organization still has roles. Still has people who carry more responsibility in certain domains. Still has decisions that not everyone participates in equally. What changes is the basis of authority. In a power-over system, authority comes from position and is exercised through control. In a power-with system, authority is delegated by the group for specific purposes and is accountable to shared needs.
Flat doesn't get you there. Power-with does. They're not the same thing.
Kashtan's Three Shifts — and Why OFNR Alone Isn't Enough
Kashtan argues that self-managing systems fail not because people are bad at communicating, but because they haven't made the underlying structural shifts that power-with actually requires. She names three of them.
1. From power-over to power-with in decision-making.
This isn't about consensus on everything. It's about being honest about who is deciding, on what basis, with what accountability to the group's shared needs. A lot of "flat" organizations fail here because they confuse transparency with equality. Announcing a decision clearly is not the same as making it in a power-with way. The question is: whose needs shaped the decision? Who could have said "this doesn't work for me" and been heard?
2. From individual to collective responsibility.
Domination systems teach us to own our territory and protect our lanes. Peer-to-peer accountability — being willing to name it when a pattern is harming the group, and to receive that naming without defensiveness — is genuinely hard to build. It requires trust that doesn't exist by default just because everyone agreed to "do it differently."
Collective responsibility is not the same as collective blame. It means the group holds shared ownership of its patterns. When power-over dynamics creep back in, the question isn't "who is the bad actor" but "what are we doing together that keeps producing this?"
3. From structural inequality to transparent resource stewardship.
Who has access to what information? Who carries which risks? Who controls the money, the network, the decision-making history? Power-with requires that these be visible and actively governed — not assumed away because everyone "has an equal voice."
This third shift is where most intentional organizations stall. It requires naming uncomfortable differences in capacity, access, and risk — and then making agreements about them explicitly, rather than pretending they don't exist.
What NVC Can and Can't Do Here
Be honest about this: NVC is not a structural remedy on its own.
Kashtan herself has been clear on this point for years. OFNR — observations, feelings, needs, requests — is a relational technology. It can transform how individuals relate to each other across power differences. It can reduce the harm of necessary conflict. It can help a team stay connected to what actually matters when everything gets hard.
But it doesn't redistribute decision-making authority. It doesn't change who controls resources. It doesn't eliminate the fact that in most organizations, some people carry more risk than others if things go wrong.
A 2024 scoping review of NVC studies in healthcare settings found real improvements in interpersonal relationships, reduced workplace conflict, and stronger cultures of empathy — across seven studies with 185 participants. Those are genuine gains. They're also gains at the relational level. The structural question — who decides, who benefits, who bears the risk — is a different question.
This matters especially for facilitators and community-builders who've been trained in NVC and are tempted to use it as the whole answer. It's a powerful part of the answer. Used without the structural lens, it can become a sophisticated way to feel better about participating in a system that still runs on power-over logic.
Rosenberg didn't want that. He wrote about NVC as a tool of liberation, not accommodation. The most honest thing you can do with it in a hierarchical context is use it to see more clearly — and then decide what to do with what you see.
If you want to go deeper on this work with others who are practicing it, the NVC Learning Community is a place for exactly that conversation.
A Practice for the Next Time It Happens
You're in the meeting. The dynamic is happening again. Someone's voice is running the room, the flat structure is doing nothing to check it, and everyone can feel it but nobody's saying it.
Try this: name a need, not a complaint. Not "you're dominating the conversation" but "I'm noticing I need more space for other perspectives before we move forward. Can we slow down?"
That's not a structural fix. It's a micro-intervention that keeps the connection alive while the dynamics shift. It buys time. It models something.
And then after the meeting, the harder question: what agreement would this group need to make — about roles, about accountability, about how resources and information flow — so that individual interventions aren't the only thing standing between power-with and power-over?
That question is Kashtan's contribution. NVC gives you the language to ask it without creating another war. The structural work is what you build from there.
FAQ
Q: What's the difference between a flat organization and a power-with organization? A: A flat organization removes formal hierarchy — titles, org charts, top-down authority. A power-with organization operates from a different theory of authority altogether: roles exist, but authority is delegated by the group for specific purposes and is accountable to shared needs. You can have a flat organization that runs entirely on power-over logic; informal hierarchies fill the vacuum the formal ones left.
Q: Why do intentional communities and cooperatives recreate hierarchy? A: Because removing formal authority doesn't remove the underlying logic of domination. Social capital, confidence, tenure, and access to information still shape who influences decisions. Without structural shifts — in how decisions are made, how accountability works, and how resources are governed — the same dynamics reappear in a form that's harder to name or challenge.
Q: Can NVC fix organizational power dynamics? A: NVC is a powerful relational tool, not a structural one. It can help people navigate power differences, stay in hard conversations, and make genuine agreements. But it doesn't redistribute decision-making authority or change who controls resources. Structural change requires structural work; NVC supports that work at the relational layer.
Q: What are Miki Kashtan's three shifts for self-managing organizations? A: Kashtan identifies: (1) from power-over to power-with in decision-making — being honest about who decides and with what accountability; (2) from individual to collective responsibility — the group owns its patterns together; and (3) from structural inequality to transparent resource stewardship — making visible who has access to information, risk, and resources, and governing those differences explicitly.
Q: Who is Mary Parker Follett and why does she matter here? A: Mary Parker Follett was an organizational theorist writing roughly a century ago who first articulated the power-over / power-with distinction. Kashtan credits her explicitly. Follett's insight was that power doesn't have to mean control over others — it can mean the capacity to act together. That frame is the foundation of what Kashtan builds on.
Q: How do I use NVC when I notice power-over dynamics in my group? A: Name a need, not a complaint. "I need more space for other perspectives before we move forward" opens a conversation. "You're dominating" closes one. NVC gives you the language to intervene without creating another confrontation — and to stay in connection while the dynamics shift. The structural work comes after.
The Myth Worth Retiring
Non-hierarchy as an organizational ideal has been tried enough times now that the failure mode is predictable: informal hierarchies fill the vacuum that formal ones left. Often less accountable. Often less visible. Sometimes harder to challenge.
Power-with is a different aspiration. It doesn't promise flatness. It promises transparency, accountability, and genuine participation in decisions that affect you. It requires more work than removing a title. It requires the three shifts Kashtan describes, sustained over time, with enough trust and skill to stay in the conversation when it gets hard.
NVC is one of the best tools we have for that conversation. It's not the only thing the conversation needs.
If you're building something — a team, a community, a movement — and you want it to actually work differently, start by distinguishing what you're actually trying to build. Flat is an absence. Power-with is a practice.
Those are not the same thing.
Ready to explore this with others who are doing the same work? The NVC Learning Community is where this conversation lives.
Comments