Sublime

Ad-Agency Secret #22: Authority Positioning Are you an authority on your topic? The Cues of Life model tells us that authority figures have a great deal of credibility. Therefore, the claims they make are widely believed. Using the mental shortcut of peripheral processing, they rationalize that an authority knows what he’s talking about. After all,

this practice can help to shift the locus of authority from assumed Authority vested in the teaching staff to including oneself in the arena of authority—a key feature of the deep shift to critical-systemic consciousness described in chapter 3.)

But it is tricky. Your authorizers may experience you as subversive when you deliberately exceed your authority. But unless you purposefully and carefully dance on the edge of your scope of authority and risk the pushback, you may never move your organization or community forward

nothing was more disturbing to the students as a group than the admittedly provocative suggestion that when they are in a position of formal authority, they have virtually no autonomy. So strong are the forces acting on them to maintain the equilibrium of the social system, they are essentially only puppets on a string.