POWER vs CONTROL – What’s the difference?

There is a subtle difference between Power and Control. We can have power without control, but control usually creates power.

There are two contexts here which are quite different. Let’s look at ‘internal’ control first.

You and I have – or should have - both power and control over our ‘selves’. Power to choose and decide what to be, do and have and control to exercise the way we take action to achieve what we desire.

Some people might call this ‘self-discipline’ and sometimes the two have been combined into the concept of ‘will power’.

Self-power is all about making choices and decisions and self-control is about sticking to them and not being distracted or diverted into activities counter to those decisions.

Not so much procrastination or what psychologists call ‘displacement activities’ or when we decide to do thongs ‘out of order’ or ‘on another project’ but those activities and thoughts which are in conflict with or actually counterproductive in relation to the decisions we’ve made.

The other context is much more complex. It’s when we look at power and control over or exerted by others. The simplest way to describe it is with a military example.

The commander or General has the power to decide the strategy in a campaign and make the decisions about what needs to be done and achieved; but he or she has little or no control over what happens on the ‘front line’.

It’s the local, lower level officers who control the tactics and what the troops on the ground actually do. Battles are usually won or lost by those ‘control’ decisions made at the front rather than the strategies devised by the commanders.

We can translate this fairly easily into a corporate or political context. The Board or the Cabinet has the power, but control is exercised by front line management, civil servants and the supervisors.

Commanders, Ministers and Directors who can exercise control ‘from thee top’ successfully are quite rare and for most who try to do this it all goes horribly wrong. Exercising power and control over others is not an easy thing to do.

But what about those ‘front line’ people who are ‘in control’ of what they are doing? Do they not have power as well? Yes, they do, but not in the context of the whole organisation, only their ‘section’ of it.

If we leave the ‘organisation’ situations and go to a personal level at one extreme and a societal level at the other, things are very different and this can also be the case between individuals or groups, both inside organisations and on a personal level.

For some reason human societal culture seems to have evolved into or developed a need to exercise power and control over others. Sometimes this is ‘enforced’ through customs of religion especially through the institution of ‘marriage’ (formal or otherwise). Although this has been modified in some societies, it is sill an issue of control over, or even ownership of, one person by another.

Most control over others though, is effected through manipulation of one form or another, even more so now there are multiple channels of communication.

In a sense, on an individual, one to one or one to many, basis control has become more ‘important’ than power in any formal sense. Control by others through manipulation has the effect of undermining our personal power, the power we have in ourselves to make choices and decisions and so we must be much more vigilant, careful, and sometimes sceptical about what we hear, see, and read in all forms of media, mass and ‘social’.