The Coop Decision That Wasn't Made in Council
It was a Wednesday in March. Our Council had spent ninety minutes on a chicken coop proposal: where to put it, who'd build it, what the budget would be. We voted by consent. Someone brought biscuits. The meeting wrapped at 10:15pm and everyone went to bed feeling democratic.
Three weeks later, walking back from the orchard, a newer member asked me a question I wasn't ready for. "Was the coop already decided before that meeting?"
I started to say no. Then I thought about it for a second. The location had come from Henrik, who'd flagged it to me at breakfast a month earlier. The builder was Sara, who'd offered before the proposal even hit the agenda. The budget was a number I'd quietly negotiated with Pat over tea. By the time the proposal reached Council, the meeting was a ratification dressed up as deliberation.
That's how most communities actually work. Power mapping is the practice of making it visible.
What Power Mapping Is
Power mapping is a structured exercise to figure out who actually decides what in your community, separate from who's supposed to.
The exercise is diagnostic. You're surfacing the gap between your stated governance and your actual governance. Every community has one. The healthier ones know what theirs looks like.
In a 14-person Sanctuary, you typically find that two or three people make about 70% of the meaningful day-to-day decisions. They might hold no formal title. They might have lived there longest. They might be the ones who answer messages fastest. Whatever the reason, they have informal authority that the written rules don't acknowledge.
Until you map it, you can't talk about it. Once you map it, you have something to work with.
The Four Types of Power to Look For
Power in community life takes several forms. At least four flavors show up, and any given member usually holds one or two strongly.
Positional power. Who holds a formal role: Steward, Treasurer, Council facilitator, working group lead. This is the one written down somewhere. Easiest to map. Often the least predictive of who actually decides things.
Relational power. Who has direct lines to whom. The member that everyone goes to when they're upset. The pair who've been roommates for eight years and finish each other's sentences. The newcomer who happens to be the founder's adult child. Relational power is invisible on org charts and decisive in practice.
Expertise power. The person whose opinion ends arguments because they're the only one who actually understands the septic system, the tax filing, or the legal structure. Expertise power is benign right up until the expert is the only one who knows, and then it becomes a single point of failure.
Historical power. The founder. The member who remembers how the kitchen rules were originally agreed in 2017. The person who was here for the schism in 2019 and shapes every conflict-related conversation through that lens. Historical power belongs to whoever holds the institutional memory.
A good power map names all four for each member. Most members hold a mix. The few who hold three or four flavors at once are your community's true centers of gravity, regardless of what your governance document says.
How to Run the Exercise
Block 90 minutes. Get the full membership in one room. Bring sticky notes, a wall, and a willingness to be a little uncomfortable.
The shape we use:
1. Name a recent decision. Pick three or four real decisions from the last quarter. The chicken coop. The new member intake. The vote to repaint the common house. Specific, concrete. 2. Trace the actual path. For each decision, walk it back. Who first raised it? Who shaped the proposal? Who quietly killed alternatives? Who consented in Council? Who carried out the work? 3. Mark each member's role. Use sticky notes on a member-name grid. "Originated," "Shaped," "Endorsed," "Ratified," "Executed," "Bypassed." Every member gets a sticker for every decision. 4. Step back and look. After three or four decisions are mapped, patterns appear. The same three names keep showing up under "Shaped." Two members are entirely under "Ratified." One person is consistently under "Bypassed." 5. Talk about what you see. Keep the tone diagnostic. The goal is to acknowledge the actual shape of your decision-making, without anyone going home feeling scapegoated.
The first time we ran this, the most senior elder of our Sanctuary turned out to be on the bypassed end of about half the decisions in the previous three months. She was furious. She was also right to be. The exercise had surfaced a drift that nobody had wanted to name.
That conversation took the rest of the evening. It was the most honest Council we'd had in two years.
What You'll Find (and Why It Hurts)
The findings are almost always the same. Some version of:
- Two or three members shape the agenda for everyone
- One member who's been there longest has effective veto over anything they care about
- Three members are systematically under-consulted on decisions that affect them
- The founder still pulls strings on things they explicitly handed off
- The newest members have almost no power of any kind, which they already knew
These findings can feel ugly. Look closer and they're just the actual structure of your community, drawn on a wall instead of carried around in everyone's private resentments. The mess was always there. It's visible now.
A community that can look at its real power map without flinching is healthier than one that pretends the org chart is the truth.
What to Do With the Map
A power map is diagnostic. It tells you what's true. The repair work is separate.
Common moves after a first map:
- Rotate informal roles into formal ones. If one member has been the de facto Treasurer for three years without the title, name it. Give them the role, the support, and a successor plan.
- Distribute expertise. If one member is the only one who understands the well pump, the legal structure, or the insurance, pair them with an apprentice. Give the apprentice ninety days to learn.
- Rebalance who shapes the agenda. Set a rotating Council facilitator. Limit any one member to facilitating two months a year. The act of shaping agendas is the act of shaping outcomes.
- Surface the bypassed. If a member is consistently under-consulted, go ask them what they want to be consulted about. Most bypassed members have one or two areas where they want a say and are quietly resigned about the rest.
- Audit the founder's residual influence. Founders almost always retain more power than they think they handed off. Name it kindly. Help them let go in measurable steps.
You don't fix the map all at once. Pick one or two things. Try them for six months. Re-map.
The Risks of Doing It Badly
Power mapping done well is one of the most useful exercises a Sanctuary can run. Done badly it can be ugly.
Three failure modes to avoid:
Doing it without trust. If the community is already in active conflict, mapping will pour fuel on the fire. Wait until the room is calm enough to look at hard truths without immediately attacking each other.
Doing it as a tribunal. This isn't a corruption inquiry. The phrase "you have too much power" is rarely useful. The phrase "I notice you shape most agriculture decisions and I'd like more say in that" is much more useful. Coach the room toward the second.
Mapping it once and never again. Power shifts. A map from 2024 is wrong by 2026. Bake it into your annual rhythm. Once a year, fresh sticky notes.
We do ours each January, the same week we do our annual budget. It takes two hours. It surfaces drift while drift is still small.
What Power Mapping Is For
The point isn't to flatten power. Some members will always have more influence than others. The longest-tenured member will always carry historical weight. The septic expert will always have the last word on septic. Visible, named, agreed-on power is healthy. The trouble is the hidden kind.
A community that can answer "who decides what here?" with a clear, agreed answer has done most of the hard work of governance. The protocols, the meeting structures, the consent forms: those are downstream of that one question.
Power mapping is how you get the answer. If your community has never run the exercise, you don't know your own governance as well as you think you do. That's the strongest case for blocking ninety minutes this month and finding out.
Where ARA Helps
Once you've drawn the map, the question becomes how to keep it visible week to week. We use ARA's Council module to attach an "originated by," "shaped by," and "ratified by" field to every Proposal. Six months later, when someone asks "wait, who actually pushed this through?", the trail is right there. No relitigating. No reconstructing from memory.
The wall map is one snapshot. The Council record is the moving picture. Pair them and the gap between your stated governance and your real governance starts to close on its own.
A Last Note
The first time you run power mapping in your community, somebody is going to cry. Somebody is going to get defensive. Somebody is going to insist the exercise is reductive and unfair.
Do it anyway. The discomfort is the entire point. Communities that can sit with it, stay in the room, and finish the exercise come out stronger every time. The ones that flinch and put the sticky notes away keep playing the same hidden games until they eventually break.
Make it visible. Then talk about it.