An empty modern boardroom with a long table and identical orange chairs facing a large screen at the front of the room.

Where power really begins?

Jan 10, 2026 | Leadership, Inclusivity, Power, Support, Trust

Why strategy is about meaning, not decisions.

Part 1 of 3

There’s a phrase we use constantly in organizational life that I’ve started to find deeply strange.

“We need a seat at the table.”

Internal communications uses it. HR uses it. DEI uses it. Strategy teams use it. Entire professions organize themselves around the hope of being invited into a room where the real decisions are made.

But lately I’ve been wondering something more fundamental.

Why do we believe the table is where strategy should live in the first place?

The metaphor carries more weight than we usually notice. The table assumes that power belongs in rooms. That strategy is produced by a small group. That meaning is created by those with formal authority and then distributed outward. That everyone else waits.

This isn’t just a governance choice. It’s a worldview.

bell hooks once wrote that domination depends on “the ability to define reality and have those definitions accepted as truth.” That line has stayed with me because it names something organizations rarely acknowledge. Power isn’t only exercised through decisions. It’s exercised through interpretation.

Long before leaders choose between options, someone has already decided what the problem is.

Herbert Simon and James March described organizations as bounded systems in which attention is scarce and framing determines what is even visible as a choice. Karl Weick later showed that organizations don’t simply make decisions. They make sense. They construct interpretations and act on them as if they are objective reality.

In that framing, strategy isn’t primarily about selecting options.

Strategy is the production of meaning.

And meaning is shaped long before anyone votes.

It shows up in how an issue is first described.
In which data is included, and which is ignored.
In which language becomes the standard.
In which voices are treated as signal and which as noise.

Two leaders can look at the same situation and see entirely different realities because they’re operating inside different interpretive frames. Those frames aren’t created at the table. They’re built across conversations, histories, identities, and access.

I’ve also been learning from ways of working that begin from a very different understanding of power altogether. Through my work with the WISE Council and conversations with Jace Poirier, I’ve been introduced to the COYA framework, which is grounded in Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

COYA holds that we aren’t just products of our circumstances, but the consequences of our actions, and that influence begins with relationship, responsibility, and legacy rather than position or authority.

In their circle-based ways of working, everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice. Listening is held as care. Legitimacy is shared rather than earned through dominance.

It’s stayed with me because it shows that power doesn’t have to reside in hierarchy to be real. It can be relational. It can be reciprocal. And it can be designed into the room long before any formal decision is ever made.

This is where hierarchy quietly becomes epistemology.

Hierarchy doesn’t only distribute authority.
It distributes interpretive power.

Who gets early context?
Who sees ambiguity?
Who is trusted with uncertainty?
Who shapes the first story that later becomes “the facts”?

None of this appears on an org chart. All of it determines culture.

When people say “we’re all equal here,” I believe the intention. But in organizations, equality of worth often coexists with deep inequality of interpretive authority. Two people can hold similar titles and live inside entirely different realities simply because one is closer to where meaning is first constructed.

This is where silence begins to matter.

When access to interpretation is uneven, people don’t stop making sense. They build meaning with fragments. Narratives harden. Trust erodes. Not because people are difficult, but because humans are sensemaking systems. When meaning is absent, it’s replaced.

bell hooks warned that systems of domination survive by making their structures appear natural and inevitable. The table does exactly that. It naturalizes the idea that strategy belongs in rooms, that meaning should be centralized, and that authority should precede understanding.

And that leads me to the question I can’t ignore.

The problem is not that internal communications isn’t invited to the table.

The problem is that organizations still believe meaning should be produced at tables at all.

Because tables are designed to close.
To narrow.
To decide.
To control.

Meaning work does something very different.

It holds complexity.
It integrates contradiction.
It carries emotion.
It sustains coherence across boundaries.

Those aren’t table functions.

They are system functions.

Once you begin to see strategy as the governance of meaning rather than the selection of options, the metaphor collapses.

And really, who the eff needs a table anyway?

What organizations need is an architecture that treats interpretation as core labour, not downstream work. A design that distributes sensemaking rather than centralizes it. A governance model that understands legitimacy as something produced across the system, not bestowed from a room.

Power at work isn’t only about who decides.

It’s about who gets to decide what the decision is about.

And that is where power really begins.