#68 Yevgen Nebesov - The architecture of power

Outcome equals intelligence plus agency. Systems architect Yevgen Nebesov argues that AI is turning intelligence into a commodity, which leaves agency, the ability to get something decided and carried out, as the part of work that stays human. He has spent five years building a model for it: the power loop. Yevgen came to the topic the hard way. As a technical consultant he watched good ideas in his projects go nowhere because the power arrangement around them didn't support them, and concluded that advice only counts once it is implemented. The books on influence and leadership without authority didn't help, because they treat power as something a person owns. Actor-Network Theory pointed him elsewhere: power as a property of an arrangement of people, roles, rules and objects. A traffic light stops cars because there are traffic rules, law enforcement and a social agreement about what red means. Take the arrangement away and the light is a lamp. The power loop maps that arrangement as a flow through six domains: events, narratives, agendas, beliefs, decisions and institutions. In Yevgen's model an event carries no meaning on its own. A narrative gives it one ("technical debt" is a narrative, and the word debt does half the work). Narratives compete for the agenda, the agenda drives decisions, decisions harden into institutions, and institutions stabilize behavior until someone runs the loop again. Ben and Yevgen work through what this means for a consultant entering an organization with a fresh narrative and no knowledge of the old ones, for a weekly decision meeting that has outlived its purpose, and for a society where one party works the loop efficiently while the rest argue on Instagram. The Power Canvas, Chesterton's fence, epistemic closure and a fawn rescue club in Franconia all get their turn. Chapters 0:00 Why power: outcome equals intelligence plus agency 2:20 Power as an arrangement: the traffic light and its actants 5:20 The power loop: events, narratives, agendas, beliefs, decisions, institutions 8:51 Technical debt as a narrative, and Chesterton's fence for consultants 10:55 Hierarchy, roles and the Power Canvas as Google Maps for power 13:58 Actor-Network Theory, AI agents and agency as orchestration 16:29 Building a bridge in 2050: work shifts from execution to agency 19:31 Hollowing out an old institution with a parallel one 23:11 Small interventions, structural change and five ways to activate people 26:42 Case study: how the AfD moves through the power loop 29:40 Epistemic closure, a fawn rescue club and a microphone check across party lines 36:05 Where to start with the architecture of power About the guest Yevgen Nebesov is an independent systems architect and consultant based in Bruchsal near Karlsruhe, with more than a decade of work in transport, logistics and medical technology. His field is sociotechnical complexity, the way technical decisions, organizational structures and human behavior interlock, and he helps leaders and change practitioners act from the position they actually hold, with or without formal authority. He is writing The Architecture of Power on Leanpub and gave a TEDxKarlsruhe talk of the same name. Links and resources Yevgen Nebesov on LinkedIn:   / yevgen-nebesov   The Architecture of Power (book, Leanpub): https://leanpub.com/thearchitectureof... The framework site, including the Power Canvas: https://architectureofpower.rocks Introduction to the Power Loop (Yevgen's blog): https://www.complexitynavigator.rocks... The architecture of power, Yevgen's TEDxKarlsruhe talk:    • The architecture of power | Yevgen Nebesov...   Actor-Network Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E... Chesterton's fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The Stellar Work Podcast Conversations on transformation, flow, and the future of work. 🎧 Listen on all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.page 📬 Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork 💼 Host: Ben, founder of Stellar Work ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━