Texture

Thinking and action

Fine weave of pattern and interaction

The texture of power and influence

I’ve been reflecting on texture as the felt quality of systems we often describe only in abstract terms.

We speak easily about structure, strategy, and authority, but these concepts rarely capture how power is actually experienced. Texture is what we notice instead: the resistance we meet when we push, the ease or friction in a conversation, the tone that settles in a room before anyone speaks. It is the difference between a rule that guides and one that constrains.

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Texture emerges where thinking meets action. Ideas alone are smooth and weightless; practice gives them grain. Through repeated interactions, intentions acquire feel. A decision-making process develops rough edges or gentle curves depending on how people are heard, corrected, or ignored along the way.

This is why identical structures can produce very different outcomes. The pattern may be the same on paper, but the texture varies with trust, habit, and attention. Power exercised with care feels different from power exercised with urgency or fear, even when the formal authority is identical.

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To attend to texture is to move beyond surface reform. It asks leaders to sense how influence travels, where it catches, and where it flows. Change that ignores texture often looks impressive but feels wrong. Change that works with texture reshapes experience, not just design.

Texture reminds us that power is never only held; it is encountered. And it is in that encounter, moment by moment, that organisations become either humane or brittle.