You know the pattern.

There's the parent whose needs organize the entire family's schedule. The team lead whose approval everything waits on. The friend whose emotional state determines whether the group can relax. The colleague who somehow holds veto power over decisions they're not officially authorized to make.

When we talk about power imbalance in relationships, we usually frame it as a personality problem. Someone is too controlling. Someone is too passive. Someone needs to set better boundaries. Someone needs to be more assertive.

We send people to therapy to work on their individual patterns. We coach them on communication skills. We tell them to advocate for themselves, to delegate better, to stop people-pleasing.

And sometimes? Nothing changes.

Not because people aren't trying. But because we're trying to fix a structural problem with individual solutions.

The Architecture of Influence

Here's what network science reveals: power doesn't just live in people. It lives in position.

When someone becomes a critical node in a network, the person through whom most information flows, the person most connections depend on, the person whose presence or absence fundamentally changes system behavior, they accumulate influence regardless of intention.

This is centrality. And it creates dynamics that no amount of personal boundary-setting can resolve.

Think about the manager who becomes a bottleneck. Every decision needs their input. Every conflict escalates to them. Every question routes through them. They're not trying to control everything; in fact, they're probably drowning. But the network structure has made them indispensable, and that structural position generates power whether they want it or not.

Or the family member whose emotional volatility everyone learns to manage around. The network reorganizes itself to minimize disruption. People start checking in with each other before raising certain topics. Side channels form. Information flow becomes constrained. The person doesn't need to explicitly demand this arrangement, the network adapts to structural reality.

This is what individual-level psychology misses: the shape of the network itself creates and maintains imbalance.

When "Flat" Structures Hide Hierarchies

Organizations love to announce they're "flat." Families claim everyone's voice matters equally. Friend groups insist there's no leader.

But network analysis tells a different story.

You can map actual communication patterns, for instance who talks to whom, who gets consulted, whose input changes outcomes, and discover invisible hierarchies that have nothing to do with org charts or stated values.

Some patterns you might recognize:

  • The Star Network: One central node connected to everyone, but people on the periphery barely connected to each other. Officially "collaborative." Actually: complete dependence on the center.
  • The Clustered Network: Tight subgroups with sparse bridges between them. Information pools in silos. The person who bridges clusters accumulates enormous informal power.
  • The Chain: Information flows linearly. Break one link, lose whole segments. The person positioned at the junction point between segments can gate-keep, filter, or completely block flow.

None of these require anyone to be trying to dominate. The structure creates the imbalance.

What Systems Thinking Offers

When you start seeing relationships as networks, different intervention points become visible:

Instead of asking "Why is this person so controlling?" Ask: "What dependencies in this network structure make their position central? What would need to change for influence to distribute differently?"

Instead of asking "Why can't they assert themselves?" Ask: "What would it take for this person's position in the network to carry more structural weight? What connections or capabilities are missing?"

You're no longer debugging personalities. You're examining architecture. And architecture can be redesigned.