The seven domains of power

Two social psychologists, John French and Bertram Raven, sat down in 1959 and counted the kinds of power a person can hold over another. They found five. Raven went back in 1965 and added a sixth. The list has been taught in management courses ever since, mostly to people who then walk into a meeting and read exactly one of the six.

Seven is my count, and where I split from them is deliberate: I pull story out from under information, I pull relationships out from under the favour-trading everyone lumps into "referent," and I keep legitimacy separate from the formal-legitimate kind an org chart hands you, because the two are opposites more often than not. So the seven, in an order that is itself the argument, top to bottom. The ones people chase first, that fake easiest and evaporate fastest, sit at the top. The ones people chase last, that cannot be faked and hold when everything else fails, sit at the bottom.

Position. The authority the org chart draws. You get it handed to you from above, usually in an afternoon, sometimes in an email with a new title in the signature. You fake it by acting senior, cc'ing people up the chain, borrowing someone's letterhead, standing near the person who actually has it. It pays out wherever the rules are followed and someone is checking that they are. And it buys you compliance and not one gram of belief. People do the exact minimum the chart requires of them and save the good ideas, the early warning, the benefit of the doubt, for someone they actually rate. This is the currency everyone banks first because it is the only one the chart can see, which is also why it is the one most often mistaken for the whole game.

Money. Who pays. Earned, raised, inherited, or just controlled on behalf of someone else. You fake it with the lifestyle, the watch, the round you announced but have not closed. It pays out wherever the thing is for sale, which is a lot of places and not all of them. Money buys attention and it rents loyalty by the hour, and the hour always ends. It converts into the other six only while the tap is running; stop paying and watch how fast the room remembers it never actually rated you. This is where the whole "money just buys the other six" objection lives, so I will kill it here rather than pretend it does not knock: money buys the act of the other six. It buys someone doing relationship-shaped things, saying legitimacy-shaped things, standing where the force would stand. It does not buy the thing. The favour a person does you because you pay them dries up the day you stop; the favour a person does you because you covered for them in 2019 does not. You can rent the performance of all six. You cannot buy a single one outright, and the room can always tell which one it is watching.

Force. Who can hurt you and make it stick. You win it by controlling the thing another person is afraid to lose: the job, the access, the reference, the thing they would rather nobody saw. You fake it with the empty threat, the bluff nobody bothers to test until the day they do. It pays out wherever the target has more to lose than you do, and nowhere else. But force buys the act and poisons everything around it. A room that complies because it is afraid of you will withhold story, relationships, and belief on purpose, quietly, as the only power it has left. You get the nod and you lose the six things you would actually need to get anything real done. The one everyone swears is off the table, right up to the afternoon it is very much on it.

Information. Knowing first, and deciding who else gets to know and when. You win it by being early, by being trusted with it, by sitting where it flows before it reaches the room. You fake it with the knowing nod, the implication that you have already heard, the confident sentence with nothing under it. It pays out wherever a decision is pending and the relevant fact is still scarce. And it decays the instant you spend it: tell everyone what you know and you are holding nothing, so the whole value is in the timing of the release, not the fact. This is the currency AI is quietly wrecking. When everyone can retrieve the fact in four seconds, being the one who knew it first is worth less every year, and confident fabrication makes the fake version cheaper than it has ever been. Knowing first still matters. Being the only one who can find out, less so by the month.

Relationships. Who owes whom. Won slowly, and only slowly, by covering for people and delivering the thing before anyone had to ask you for it. You fake it with name-dropping and the transactional favour dressed up as friendship, which fools no one who has actually banked the real kind. It pays out wherever an exception needs signing off the record, wherever the answer is technically no but becomes yes because of who is asking. And it is non-transferable and destroyed by clumsy spending. You cannot buy the favour bank and you cannot hand it to your successor, and the fastest way to empty it is to call in a debt too baldly, in front of people, as though it were owed. Do that once and the account quietly closes.

Story. Whose version of what happened becomes the version repeated at lunch until it simply is what happened. Won by framing first and framing well, before the other accounts set. Faked with spin, the confident narrative with nothing under it, and now manufactured at industrial volume by anyone with a prompt. It pays out wherever memory is contested and nobody is checking the tape. Think about what most people know about Rosa Parks: a tired seamstress who would not give up her seat. She was a trained NAACP secretary, the movement had been hunting for a test case for months, a teenager named Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same refusal nine months earlier, and the organisers chose Parks as the public face on purpose. The "tired feet" version is not what happened. It is the version that won, because it was the better story and the true one was more complicated, and the better story is the one that gets repeated. Parks said herself the only tired she was, was tired of giving in. Story is powerful and it has a hard ceiling: a beautiful account with no force and no legitimacy behind it gets stopped cold the afternoon someone who actually holds those two decides the show is over.

Legitimacy. The person everyone simply believes is in the right, so the exact move that reads as scheming when you do it reads as fairness when they do. It is conferred, only ever by other people, and only over time, by being seen to act rightly when acting rightly cost you something. It is the hardest of the seven to fake and the most fatal when the fake is caught: performed virtue does not just fail, it takes the whole currency down with it the instant it is exposed. It pays out everywhere, quietly, and it is the only one of the seven that makes the other six look clean instead of grubby. Gandhi held no office, commanded no army, controlled no treasury, and moved a subcontinent, because the one currency he had was the one that cannot be handed down a chart or bought at any price. And that is the whole point: you cannot purchase legitimacy, cannot order it, cannot borrow it for the afternoon, and every other currency you are visibly caught spending to acquire it destroys exactly the thing you were trying to buy.

Read the list back and the through-line is doing the ordering. Grant-ability and fake-ability fall as you go down. Staying power rises. Position and money are handed over and counterfeited in an afternoon and gone the moment the granting stops; legitimacy and the deep-relationship kind take years, resist faking, and hold when every other currency has walked out of the room.

Now the honest part, because a hostile reader breaks a tidy map on the middle rungs and they would be right to. The two ends are clean. Position at the top is the cheapest to grant and the cheapest to fake; legitimacy at the bottom is the dearest to win and the hardest to counterfeit. The middle three do not sit on one straight line. Information is trivial to fake and hard to win. Relationships are hard to fake and hard to win. So this is a trend across the seven, not a strict rank at every step, and anyone who sells you a clean monotonic ladder is selling you a story with nothing under it. The claim that holds is the whole pattern: the currencies you reach for first are the ones that trade worst and fake easiest, and the ones you reach for last are the ones that actually move a room and cannot be forged. Everyone overpays for the top of the list, because the top of the list is the part the chart can see.

The obvious objection is that these overlap so much they are one thing. Force is just position with menace. Legitimacy is just story that stuck. Relationships are just information about who owes you. Call the whole pile "influence" and stop pretending there are seven. The overlap is real, and it is exactly why the map is worth keeping, because you can see they are separate from the fact that each one fails in its own specific way, in a room where a specific other one happens to be live, and the failures do not substitute for each other. The man who mistook his force for position gives a direct order he was entirely allowed to give and watches four people slow-walk it into next quarter. The person who mistook her story for legitimacy wins the framing all week and gets the show stopped anyway by someone who held the two currencies she did not. If these were one substance, being strong would help everywhere. Instead, strength in the wrong currency is the precise mechanism by which the titled man loses to the intern with a story. You can call all seven "influence" if you like. The word does no work at the actual table, because it cannot tell you which currency is paying out here, or whether you walked in holding any of it. And the last proof they are separate: fluency in one reliably blinds you to the other six, and one substance cannot blind you to itself.

So, the read. Not a test you run once and frame. A thing you do twice, fast, every time a room turns and you do not know why.

First pass, which currency is paying out. Ask what actually moved the decision in here. Who got obeyed without anyone arguing, which is position or force. Who got believed without anyone checking, which is legitimacy or story. Who got the exception signed off the record, which is relationships. Who held the one fact everybody needed and only they had, which is information. Who was writing the cheque, which is money. The currency that answers "why did the room turn that way" is the one that is live at this table.

Second pass, which of the seven you walked in holding. Run the same list down yourself and be honest about the stack, especially about the pile you are proudest of, because that is the one you will overrate. Then the only move that matters. If your stack does not include the currency that is live, you are not a strong person holding the wrong pile. You are holding nothing that spends in this room. So stop spending it louder, which is what everyone does, because getting louder in a currency the room does not accept is the single most common way capable people lose. Find the person who holds the live currency and trade for it, or change which room you are in.

The diagnostic that closes it, if you want one you can actually use tonight: name the last three rooms you lost, and for each one name the currency that was actually live and the currency you kept spending into it. If it was the same mismatch all three times, you do not have a power problem. You have a currency you cannot read, and it is costing you the same room over and over while you go home and blame the room.