Dear ones,

I want to ask you a question that almost never gets asked in a governance meeting, a board retreat, or a legal consultation.

What shape is the power?

Not who holds it. Not whether the right people hold it, or whether enough women hold it, or whether the leadership reflects the community it serves. All of those questions matter. But they are secondary to a prior question that shapes everything that follows.

What shape does the power take?

I first encountered this question in its clearest form through the teaching of Pat McCabe — known also as Woman Stands Shining, a Diné artist, activist, and ceremonial leader — who names the fundamental problem of our current moment not as a policy problem, not as a diversity problem, and not as a leadership pipeline problem. She names it as a design problem. We have organized human society around a shape — the triangle, the hierarchy, the pyramid — that is structurally incapable of producing the outcomes we say we want.

The triangle is not a neutral design. It is a choice. And it has an alternative.

What the triangle produces

The triangle has a logic that is internally consistent and, once you see it clearly, surprisingly simple. Authority originates at the apex and flows downward. The further you are from the apex, the less your voice counts, the less authority you hold, and the more you exist to serve the needs of those above you. Resources flow up. Accountability flows down. The apex is accountable to no one within the structure — only, nominally, to external forces: shareholders, regulators, voters, funders, or God, depending on the institution.

The triangle produces certain things reliably. Efficiency in transmitting directives from top to bottom. Clarity about who has final say. A defensible paper trail of decision-making authority.

But it also produces other things, just as reliably.

It produces the concentration of power at the apex and the progressive silencing of those below. It produces the protection of the institution over the protection of its members or its community. It produces conflict resolution through hierarchy — meaning that disputes are decided by whoever is higher up, which means the outcome of any conflict is largely determined before the process begins by the relative positions of the parties. It produces a relationship to time that is short — the quarterly report, the annual budget, the two-year board term — because the apex changes regularly and has no structural memory. And it produces a relationship to the natural world that is extractive, because the triangle has no mechanism for representing the interests of those who cannot speak in its chambers: the land, the water, the species that share it, and the generations who have not yet been born.

These are not accidental byproducts. They are structural outcomes. The triangle produces them because it is designed to produce them — not through conscious malice, but through the internal logic of its shape.

When we say that a system structurally supports domination, this is what we mean. Not that every person within it is acting in bad faith. But that the shape of the system — the triangle, the hierarchy, the power-over logic — consistently produces outcomes that protect concentrated power and undermine the authority of those who hold lineage, community memory, and ecological accountability.

Not because of the people in it. Because of its shape.

What the circle holds

The circle is the alternative design. It is also the older design — older by millennia than the hierarchy, present in governance traditions across cultures and continents that predate the nation-state, the corporation, and the legal profession.

In the circle, there is no apex. There is a center — and what sits at the center is not a person or a position, but a shared purpose, a community's commitments, a relationship to the land and to the generations. Authority is not assigned by appointment or election. It is recognized by the community, earned through demonstrated wisdom, accountability, and service to the whole.

Decision-making in the circle moves through deliberation rather than directive. Every voice has the opportunity to be heard before a decision is made. Dissent is not overridden by numerical majority — it is held as information, as the community's signal that something has not yet been understood, that the deliberation is not yet complete.

Conflict in the circle is not resolved by whoever sits higher up. It is held by the community itself, through processes that are restorative rather than adversarial — that seek to understand the harm, repair the relationship, and restore the capacity of all parties to continue in community together.

Time in the circle is long. Because authority is held by those who carry the longest memory — the grandmothers, the elder women, the ones who have held the community's commitments across the challenges of their lifetimes — the time horizon of decision-making extends beyond the current leadership's tenure. Seven generations is approximately one hundred and seventy-five years. No quarterly report addresses that time horizon. But a governance structure organized around the authority of grandmothers can.

And the natural world in the circle is not an externality. It is a stakeholder — or more precisely, the relationship to the land is a governance responsibility held by the community as a whole. The community's continuity depends on the health of the land that sustains it. This is not metaphor. It is governance architecture.

What changes when you change the shape

I want to be honest with you about something. Changing the shape is not the same as changing the faces at the top. And it is much harder.

The triangle has gravity. It pulls toward its own premises. It is the water that most of us swim in — the structure of every organization we have belonged to, every institution we have navigated, every legal document we have signed. When you grow up in the triangle, you internalize its logic. You measure success by its metrics. You resolve conflict by its methods. You plan in its time horizons.

Choosing the circle means working against that gravity. Consciously, deliberately, in every conversation and every document and every governance decision.

It also means developing new capacities — for sitting with disagreement rather than resolving it quickly, for holding a longer time horizon than the next fiscal year, for listening to the elder voices in the room even when efficiency would prefer to move on, for understanding the health of the land as a governance responsibility rather than a compliance question.

These capacities are not beyond us. They are in our lineages — in the governance traditions that the dominant system has spent centuries trying to erase. They are recoverable. And recovering them is the work.

The shape of the power is the question. The circle is the answer. And we are the ones who get to build it.

With love,

Maija

🌿 For the first time, I am bringing this work into a live course for practitioners. If what you have been reading here has been useful — if it has given you language for something you have long known in your body — I invite you to join me. And please share this with any attorney, mediator, community leader, or governance practitioner in your life who is ready for tangible legal and governance tools to help shift culture from the inside out.

Register here: https://www.maijawest.com/2026-matriarchal-governance-design-for-practitioners-course

Maija Danilova West is a governance practitioner, peacemaker, and the author of Matriarch Makeover: A 30-Day Invitation. Her forthcoming book, From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design, is addressed to practitioners of law, peacemaking, and governance who are earnestly seeking a way to practice that is more life-affirming.

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.

Last updated: 6/11/2026