CONCEPT
Co-Active Power
Follett's name for the emergent capability generated by genuine team interaction — a distinct phenomenon that is not the sum of individual powers but a product of mutual adjustment, shared purpose, and accumulated trust.
Mary Parker Follett's precise term for the form of power that arises from the interaction of individual contributions in a context of mutual respect, shared purpose, and genuine engagement. Co-active power is not the sum of individual powers. It is a distinct phenomenon that emerges from the interactions between team members. The team operating through co-active power is more than the sum of its parts — not as a cliché but as a verifiable organizational fact. The insights that emerge from genuine teamwork, the solutions that no individual member conceived but that the group generates through mutual adjustment, are products of co-active power. They cannot be reproduced by any arrangement that eliminates the interactions from which they arise. The AI discourse has largely failed to engage with this dimension.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The prevailing AI framework treats the human-AI relationship as dyadic: a single human interacting with a single AI tool. But the more transformative phenomenon is