Feminism
Freedom from domination is important from a moral perspective.
Freedom from domination is also what makes extraordinary collective performance possible.
Feminism, as bell hooks defines it, is a movement to end “sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”1,2 As we use the term in this book, feminist does not mean simply that women are present, that women hold senior positions, or that a team describes itself as inclusive. It means that the team deliberately examines and dismantles relationships that arrange people into hierarchies of human worth.
That commitment has an ethical foundation. People deserve freedom, dignity, respect, and meaningful power in the systems of which they are a part. A team that produces world-changing breakthroughs while exploiting people or reinforcing oppression will not qualify as a genius team merely because its work is extraordinary. This book is not about evil genius.
In addition to ethics, the argument here is also intensely practical. Domination makes teams less capable. It determines who is recruited, who is heard, who can disagree, who is trusted with difficult work, whose labor is visible, whose knowledge can change the plan, and who must spend energy managing danger or status rather than solving the problem. It suppresses precisely the creativity, resilience, resourcefulness, knowledge, and initiative that genius-quality work requires.
Teams seeking reliable breakthrough performance therefore cannot leave freedom from domination to chance. They must build it into how they distribute authority, make decisions, receive dissent, allocate opportunity, recognize contribution, resolve conflict, and hold power accountable.
Three questions
The chapters that follow consider three connected questions:
- What are we trying to dismantle? Feminism places opposition to sexism and patriarchy within a wider struggle against domination.
- How does domination constrain performance? It prevents human capability from becoming collective intelligence and action.
- What can history teach us? Extraordinary accomplishments reveal both the capabilities that crossed social barriers and the capabilities those barriers kept out.
Dismantling domination is part of the purpose. Fuller access to collective intelligence is one of its organizational consequences. Feminist team architecture joins those two truths in a practical discipline.