Follett’s century-old principles—power-with, situational authority, constructive conflict—form a foundational operating system for today’s agentic, decentralized, and adaptive organizations.
This article was written by Claude based on a deep research report from Gemini and then lightly edited by the administrator. Inaccuracies may exist.
The Prophet of Modern Management: Why Mary Parker Follett’s Century-Old Ideas Are More Relevant Than Ever
Mary Parker Follett died in 1933, but she might be the most important management thinker you’ve never heard of. While her contemporaries were obsessing over time-and-motion studies and treating workers like cogs in a machine, Follett was developing ideas that sound remarkably like what we now call “cutting-edge” organizational design.
Peter Drucker called her “the prophet of management,” and Warren Bennis noted that “just about everything written today about leadership and organizations comes from Mary Parker Follett’s writings and lectures.” Yet for decades, her work was dismissed as too idealistic—apparently, the notion that treating people like humans might actually improve business outcomes was considered radical.
Today, as companies struggle to become more agile, flatten hierarchies, and empower employees, they’re essentially rediscovering what Follett figured out a hundred years ago. Her insights into power, conflict, and human dynamics provide a surprisingly practical roadmap for modern organizational challenges, from self-managing teams to AI-human collaboration.
Who Was Mary Parker Follett?
Born in 1868 to a well-off Quaker family in Massachusetts, Follett had the kind of interdisciplinary education that would make any modern knowledge worker envious. She studied government, economics, law, and philosophy at what would become Radcliffe College, spending a year at Cambridge in England. Even before graduating, she published a study of congressional leadership that caught national attention.
But Follett’s real education came from the streets of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where she spent eight years doing community organizing and social work. She founded debating clubs, created programs for young men, and pioneered the revolutionary idea of keeping schools open after hours as community centers. This wasn’t just do-gooding—it was her laboratory for understanding how groups actually work, how people share power, and how communities can govern themselves.
Think of it as the ultimate field research for organizational behavior, conducted decades before business schools existed.
Her diverse background—rigorous academic training, hands-on community work, and consulting for everyone from local nonprofits to President Theodore Roosevelt—gave her a uniquely holistic perspective. While other management theorists focused on efficiency and control, Follett saw organizations as complex webs of human relationships that could be incredibly powerful when properly understood and nurtured.
Follett’s Core Ideas: A Framework That Still Works
Follett’s major works trace a logical progression from political theory to organizational practice. In The New State (1918), she outlined her vision of grassroots democracy. Creative Experience (1924) explored how people learn and grow through interaction. Her management lectures, collected posthumously in Dynamic Administration (1942), applied these insights to business challenges.
Running through all her work are several interconnected principles that feel surprisingly contemporary:
“Power-With” Instead of “Power-Over”
Most management thinking assumes someone has to be in charge—that power is about one person controlling another. Follett saw this as both ineffective and unnecessary. She distinguished between “power-over” (domination and coercion) and “power-with” (collaborative influence through shared purpose).
“Power-over” creates resistance and resentment. People don’t like being bossed around, and they’ll find ways to push back, even if it’s just passive compliance. “Power-with” emerges when people work together toward common goals, creating what she called “circular response”—a dynamic where everyone’s actions influence and are influenced by everyone else’s, like players in a tennis match where each shot builds on the last.
This isn’t just about being nice. Follett argued that “power-with” actually gets better results because it unlocks people’s full capabilities instead of just their reluctant compliance.
The Law of the Situation
Instead of following orders because someone higher up the hierarchy said so, Follett believed authority should come from the objective facts of the situation itself. The person with the most relevant knowledge and expertise should guide the decision, regardless of their formal rank.
She advocated for what she called “depersonalizing” orders—making it clear that everyone is “taking orders from the situation” rather than from an individual’s arbitrary will. This requires everyone involved to study the problem together, sharing information and perspectives until the best course of action becomes apparent.
It sounds simple, but it’s actually radical. Traditional hierarchies assume that senior people know best. Follett’s approach assumes that the people closest to the work often have the most relevant insights.
Constructive Conflict and Integration
While most organizations try to minimize conflict, Follett saw it as a source of innovation and better solutions. The key was handling it constructively.
She identified three ways people typically deal with disagreement: domination (one side wins), compromise (everyone gives up something), and integration (finding a creative solution that satisfies everyone’s underlying needs). Her famous example involved two people in a library—one wanting a window open for fresh air, the other wanting it closed to avoid a draft. Compromise would mean opening it halfway, leaving both unsatisfied. Integration meant opening a window in the next room, providing fresh air without the draft.
Integration requires understanding what people really need (not just what they’re asking for) and being willing to think creatively about solutions. It turns conflict from a zero-sum game into an innovation engine.
Circular Response and Reciprocal Relationships
Follett saw human interaction as continuously creative. We don’t just act on each other—we co-create each other through our interactions. Your behavior influences mine, which influences yours, in an ongoing dance of mutual adaptation.
This has profound implications for organizational culture. Culture isn’t something that gets imposed from the top; it emerges from the patterns of interaction throughout the organization. Every conversation, every decision, every small action contributes to the ongoing creation of what the organization becomes.
The Group Principle
Finally, Follett believed that well-functioning groups were the fundamental building blocks of effective organizations and democratic societies. Groups, not individuals, were where the real work of collaboration, learning, and innovation happened.
But she wasn’t advocating for groupthink or the suppression of individual initiative. Rather, she saw properly functioning groups as places where individuals could become more fully themselves while contributing to something larger.
Why These Ideas Matter Now
Follett’s principles might sound abstract, but they provide remarkably practical guidance for the organizational challenges companies face today.
Agentic Organizations: Empowering Individual Initiative
Modern companies increasingly need employees who can think for themselves, take initiative, and adapt quickly to changing circumstances. This agentic behavior—being proactive rather than just following orders—is essential in knowledge work, fast-moving industries, and AI-driven environments.
Follett’s framework shows how to foster this kind of agency responsibly. The “law of the situation” empowers people and AI agents alike to make decisions based on their understanding of what’s actually needed. “Power-with” ensures that individual initiative serves collective goals rather than creating chaos. “Circular response” explains how people learn and improve through interaction and feedback.
The key insight is that true agency isn’t about isolated individuals or AIs doing whatever they want. It’s about people and machines understanding their context, work collaboratively with others, and take responsibility for outcomes.
Decentralized Organizations: Distributing Authority Wisely
Many companies are pushing decision-making authority down from headquarters to local teams, business units, or even individual employees. This can increase speed and responsiveness, but it can also create coordination problems.
Follett’s principles provide the operating system for effective decentralization. The “law of the situation” justifies putting decision-making power where the relevant knowledge exists. The “group principle” supports self-managing teams. “Integration” provides a method for resolving conflicts between different units without always escalating to higher authority.
The critical point is that decentralization isn’t just about removing layers of management. It requires new ways of coordinating, sharing information, and resolving disagreements—exactly what Follett’s framework provides.
Flat Organizations: Rethinking Hierarchy
Some companies have gone further, significantly reducing or eliminating middle management layers. These “managerless” structures can be more agile and cost-effective, but they require sophisticated coordination mechanisms.
Follett’s concept of “horizontal authority”—influence based on expertise and function rather than hierarchical position—is the philosophical foundation for flat organizations. Without formal managers, “power-with” becomes the primary mode of interaction. The “law of the situation” guides peer-to-peer decision-making.
From Follett’s perspective, “managerless” doesn’t mean “leaderless.” Leadership becomes fluid and situational, emerging from whoever has the most relevant knowledge or skills for each challenge.
Complex Systems: Human-Technology Collaboration
Even in highly automated environments, humans still need to work together and interface with complex systems. Follett’s insights about coordination and feedback loops offer surprisingly relevant guidance.
The “law of the situation” aligns with data-driven decision-making, where actions are based on objective information rather than arbitrary authority. “Circular response” describes the feedback loops that make complex systems work effectively. “Power-with” can inform the design of human-AI collaboration, creating partnerships rather than simple command-and-control relationships.
Putting Follett’s Ideas Into Practice
Translating these principles into concrete organizational practices requires systematic attention to several areas:
Leadership Development: Instead of training managers to give orders and control resources, develop leaders who can facilitate collaboration, help groups discover the “law of the situation,” and guide integrative problem-solving. This requires skills in listening, empathy, and synthesizing diverse perspectives.
Team Design: Structure teams to maximize autonomy and cross-functional collaboration. Build in processes that encourage constructive conflict—structured debates, “red team” exercises, or formal integration phases in decision-making. Many agile software development practices already embody these principles.
Information Systems: The “law of the situation” requires good information. Invest in transparency and open communication channels so people can make informed decisions based on shared understanding of reality.
Conflict Resolution: Move beyond traditional grievance procedures to mechanisms that actively support integrative problem-solving. Train internal coaches who can help parties explore underlying needs and co-create solutions.
Performance Management: Align incentives with collaborative behaviors, shared responsibility, and contributions to group success, not just individual achievements that might create internal competition.
Hiring and Onboarding: Recruit for collaborative mindset, intellectual humility, and communication skills. Use onboarding to explicitly introduce these principles and set clear expectations about how power, authority, and conflict will be handled.
A manufacturing company study found that employees could readily understand and apply Follett’s concepts in their daily work, suggesting these aren’t just abstract theories but practical tools for organizational improvement.
Addressing the Skeptics
Follett’s ideas have faced criticism over the years, often dismissed as overly idealistic or impractical. Some specific misunderstandings are worth addressing:
“Too Utopian”: Critics have characterized Follett as a romantic who didn’t understand real-world constraints. But her ideas emerged from years of hands-on community organizing and business consulting. She wasn’t naive about human nature or organizational challenges—she was proposing more effective ways to work with both.
“Fits Old Categories”: Some have tried to categorize Follett as either a scientific management theorist or a human relations advocate. She was actually synthesizing both, arguing that technical and human aspects of work are inseparable and that true efficiency requires interpersonal cooperation.
“Integration Is Impossible”: Her concept of integration—finding solutions that satisfy everyone’s underlying needs—has been dismissed as unrealistic. But she wasn’t claiming it’s always possible, just that it should be the first approach before defaulting to compromise or domination.
“Suppresses Individuals”: Some worry that emphasis on groups might submerge individual initiative. Follett consistently argued the opposite—that properly functioning groups help individuals become more fully themselves while contributing to collective goals.
Many of these criticisms seem to stem from trying to fit Follett’s holistic, dynamic thinking into simpler either/or categories. Her approach consistently transcends such dichotomies, which may be why it seemed so foreign to mid-20th-century management thinking but feels increasingly relevant today.
Why Follett’s Time Has Come
The aspects of Follett’s work that led to its historical marginalization—its challenge to traditional power structures, its emphasis on participation and collaboration—are precisely what make it valuable now. The principles that seemed “subversive” to past paradigms offer practical pathways for organizations trying to become more adaptive, innovative, and engaging.
Modern organizations face challenges that hierarchical, command-and-control structures simply can’t handle effectively: rapid change, complex problems requiring diverse expertise, knowledge workers who expect autonomy and meaning, and competitive environments that reward innovation and agility.
Follett’s framework provides a coherent alternative that doesn’t sacrifice effectiveness for humanity or vice versa. Her core insight—that ethical treatment of people and practical organizational effectiveness are deeply intertwined rather than opposing forces—offers a path forward for companies trying to build more sustainable and successful organizations.
Her work demonstrates that you don’t have to choose between treating people well and getting good results. When you understand how human relationships actually work, you can design organizations that are simultaneously more humane and more effective.
As companies continue to experiment with new organizational forms, they’d be wise to learn from someone who thought deeply about these challenges a century ago. Mary Parker Follett may have been ahead of her time, but our time has finally caught up with her wisdom.
Citations
- Mary Parker Follett - Wikipedia
- (PDF) The Unfortunate Misinterpretation of Miss Follett - ResearchGate
- Mary Parker Follett | American Sociologist, Interpersonal Relations - Britannica
- Mary Parker Follett - Social Welfare History Project
- Creative Experience | book by Follett - Britannica
- ETHICS IN MANAGEMENT: EXPLORING THE CONTRIBUTION OF … - IESE
- The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government - Goodreads
- The New State: Group Organization, The Solution Of Popular Government (1918) - Amazon
- Creative Experience - Britannica
- Dynamic Administration: Mary Parker Follet | PDF - Scribd
- Dynamic Administration - Unacademy
- Power and authority: the original vision of Mary Parker Follett - IESE
- 5: The Law of the Situation - Mary Parker Follett - Talking About Organizations
- Mary Parker Follett’s Perspective on Constructive Conflict in Organizations - BA Notes
- Tech Culture - Julian Browne
- (PDF) Progressing to the Center: Coordinating Project Work - ResearchGate
- Mary Parker Follett’s Law of the Situation in Giving Orders - BA Notes
- A Postmodern Glimpse: The Principles of Mary Parker Follett - PhilPapers
- A postmodern glimpse: the principles of Mary Parker Follett in a contemporary workplace - University of Saskatchewan
- Some criticisms of Mary Parker Follett - MPFollett.ning.com