Separation of powers is a brilliant idea.

Managing power in organizations and institutions is a huge problem. Because when power is concentrated and left unchecked, tyranny happens. Separation of powers (and checks and balances) solves this problem brilliantly in the US constitution. By turning power against itself, it keeps any one part of government from dominating the others. The US Constitution is a gold standard case study in the management of power to prevent tyranny.

To me, preventing tyranny is among the most important organizational problems there are. Because under tyranny, people waste their talents and do not flourish. Because under tyranny, people suffer and have their basic human rights violated. Because under tyranny, culture decays rather than grows. Preventing tyranny is a huge deal.

In this essay, I offer Rotation of Powers - an alternative approach to managing power in organizations. I offer this idea in addition to separation of powers, not as a replacement to it, for two reasons. One, the challenge of preventing tyranny is so important we ought to be working on many solutions to this difficult problem - diversity and redundancy create long-term resilience. Two, because of information technology and advances in our understanding of management, the alternative of rotation of powers is possible in ways that were not even conceivable 10-15 years ago.

What is Rotation of Powers?

In hierarchical organizations, leadership and power is role-based. Power lies in the principal and senior executives of an organization. The idea of rotation of powers is that the people in power go into their reign expecting that they will rotate in and out of their role as “leader”. I take a turn, then you take a turn, then our colleague takes a turn being the “boss”. And then eventually, I know I’ll have to take a turn again. And we rotate, on and on, and let others join and leave the rotation as we go.

So unlike separation of powers, where the idea is to split up the power into different branches that can check each other, the idea of rotation of powers is to not let anyone stay in power long enough to become entrenched, and, to make them them feel the externalities of their decisions - both because they’ll be under the power of someone else soon, and, if they leave someone else a mess it’ll come back around. Instead of checks and balances, the operating principle of Rotation of Powers is “incentivize positive reciprocity”.

Here’s an example of how this might actually work.

I’m on team at work. Let’s call them the Knights. And without going to to too many details, the Knights try to improve our processes so that our customers are happier. It’s a team that formed from the “bottom-up”, so to speak, and operate using the principles of agile software development, more or less.

At the beginning, there were about 3 people who operated as Scrum-Masters for the team, which we call “Lance-a-lots”. The role of the Lance-a-lot is to facilitate our sprint planning sessions, and elicit input from the Knights to determine which projects folks think are important. Knights then self-select onto project teams for the 6-week sprint and the Lance-a-lot leading that particular rotation checks-in on teams to make sure progress is happening.

The group of Lance-a-lots meets weekly and consults with each other on how things are going, and how to manage the team more effectively. Anyone who wants to be a Lance-a-lot is free to join the rotation, and the Lance-a-lot group has grown from 3 to 5 in the 6 months this team has been around.

Right from the beginning, we rotated the role of the person serving as Lance-a-lot. Which means, in practice, that the person running the meeting and responsible for ensuring forward motion changed every 6 weeks.

The success of the Knights remains to be seen. It’s a nascent team, and kind of like a startup we’re trying to lock-in to a value proposition that works. But that said, it’s an incredibly uncommon organizational form and the culture of the team feels different than the traditional, corporate, hum-drum, hierarchical working group. It feels less top-down and tyrannical, more equal and democratic. Relatively speaking, at least.

Why might Rotation of Powers work?

What you’ll notice about the Knights example I gave above, is that rotation happens in two ways. One, the “Lance-a-lot” rotates every 6 weeks. Second, people move in and out of being part of the Lance-a-lot rotation. That creates an interesting dynamic that prevents power concentration.

First, no one person has the title of “leader” of the team. Nobody can lay claim to it. Nobody is burdened with an ongoing responsibility or could even lay claim to holding power if they tried. And, the role of Lance-a-lot is wide open because anyone who wants to can opt-in to the rotation. So, in practice, it feels like an organization that has leadership, but doesn’t have an absolute leader. And a sort of selection effect occurs as a result of this, anyone who is driven by the prestige of being an exclusive, role-based leader and having power wouldn’t want to opt into the rotation, because they’d never be the absolute leader of the team.

Second, at meetings of Lance-a-lots you really have a positive pressure to make good, collaborative decisions. Because Lance-a-lots have opted-in, their reputations amongst the team are especially on the line for doing a good job. And, because you know you’ll be the Lance-a-lot in a few rotations it pushes you to make a contribution and get your ideas out now - you don’t ever want the team to be in bad shape, so when it’s your turn you can make progress.

The dynamic of Rotation of Powers makes two things very clear: one, that power will, by definition, take turns so there’s no reason to be an ego-maniacal jerk about it. And two, that if you do right by the team and others you’re going to reap the benefits, and that if you leave a mess you’re shitting where you eat, so to speak.

What are the operational implications of Rotation of Powers?

Of course, this approach has trade-offs and operational challenges. Here are a few “must-haves” that I would assume have to be in place for a scheme of Rotation of Powers to work.

• A compelling, clear mission - Rotation of Powers doesn’t have the benefit of glory and spotlight. So for anyone to opt-in to the leadership rotation, they have to really care about the mission. Defining a clear and compelling mission is not easy, and would have to explicit and well understood, I think, for Rotation of Powers to work. Otherwise, nobody would opt-in to the rotation.

• Knowledge Management - For Rotation of Powers to work, the rotation has to happen quickly enough so that any one person cannot entrench themselves in power and seek rents. Transition is not easy. And in a scheme of Rotation of Powers, there would have to be good systems of knowledge and decision management to ensure transitions happened smoothly. If not, the organization would always be in a cycle of onboarding, and never have forward momentum.

• Trust and Collaboration - Similarly, if rotation is happening there has to be strong trust and collaboration among the rotating leadership team so that the direction of the team is one that has enrollment. A team would fail if with each rotation the particular leader during that rotation took the team in a whole new direction. The people in the rotation have to be on the same page for Rotation of Powers to work.

• Transparency and openness - A big challenge would preventing the people in the rotation from becoming insular and eventually self-aggrandizing. So, the leadership rotation would have to have transparency and openness to ensure what they were doing was appropriate. And, the people in the rotation would have to change over time so that the same old people don’t end up losing touch with what’s happening on the front line.

And so this approach maybe doesn’t work well in all contexts. Maybe it’s especially suited for mission-driven organizations (I happen to believe that all organizations should be mission-driven, but that’s a different blog post). And maybe it doesn’t work well in an environment where there’s a lot of specialized knowledge that’s accumulated over time, or ones where compliance to rules and protocol is really important.

But I could see something like this working for cooperatives, B-Corps, and maybe even larger public or social sector organizations. Additionally, it’s an approach that could be used within large corporations, in functions where innovation and dynamism is needed and more democratic styles of management which allow for experimentation are a strategic advantage.

Why now?

Like I said before, having more tools in our toolbox for managing power to prevent tyranny seems like a good idea because the stakes are so high. But this idea of Rotation of Power seems much more feasible than it did even 10 years ago. 50 years ago, this approach to organization design probably wasn’t even possible. Here are a few reasons why:

• Information Technology - the sort of transparency and knowledge management needed for Rotation of Powers simply was not possible before advances in information technology. Doing things like recording decisions, meetings, and real-time, cross-location, communication simply wasn’t possible because it would be administratively overwhelming. Now we have all these tools to collaborate and manage knowledge decisions, and expertise, which mitigates one of the most difficult operational implications I listed above.

• Understanding of Bureaucracy - The bureaucratic form of organization and management of large enterprises is a relatively discipline. We now know much more about how to manage organizations and establish missions and purpose, it’s actually something we can start to teach. So, now we actually know better how to create purpose-driven organizations, which again, mitigates a key operational challenge I mentioned earlier.

• Upskilling of Talent - Lots more people have higher levels of education and leadership experience. And if you have to rotate, the talent level of the team has to be sufficiently high and skills need to be sufficiently developed. A lot more people probably have those skills than they did 50 years ago. And honestly, rotating power probably accelerates that upskilling because more people get more reps leading teams.

• Emerging Technology - I’m intrigued by the use of blockchain technology and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Using software-based rules could automate some of the management of new forms of organizations (including Rotations of Power) that reduce administrative burden, and ensure that rotations are fair and that the tracking and tracing of decision rights can be effectively managed. I’m not a blockchain expert, but these sorts of ideas make the idea of experimenting with Rotations of Power seem more realistic.

Conclusions

Overall, I acknowledge that this is really a thought experiment. But I think it’s an interesting one that’s worth doing - as the world changes we need more ways to manage power and prevent tyranny, because separation of powers might not work forever. Our freedom and welfare is too important to depend on what will eventually become an old idea.

And, yes, the criticism of “that’s a cool idea, but it would never work in real life” is a valid criticism because I don’t know that it would work, especially at scale. But I would argue that we probably didn’t realize if separation of powers would work at the beginning, and we evolved it as we went. The same has been and would be true of any organizational form.

At a minimum, I hope this thought experiment validated that there are alternatives to separation of powers, to solve the problem of unchecked power and tyranny. It’s a big problem that’s worth thinking about and experimenting with.