Power and Metacognition ── No One Will Stop You Now

When I was a regulatory reviewer, there were people who stopped me. A supervisor. A legal advisor. Even the submitter who pushed back and said, in so many words, are you sure that's right? That friction — sometimes irritating, sometimes humbling — was doing something I did not fully appreciate: it was correcting me. Since becoming an executive, that friction has largely disappeared. When I speak in meetings, the room converges. Objections arrive in hallways, filtered through two intermediaries. Power is a system that quietly removes the conditions for self-correction. When I understood that, the justice disease I once recovered from — that compulsive certainty I had worked years to dismantle — became imaginable again, wearing different clothes.

The Morning Meeting ── What No One Said

The meeting ran twenty minutes, ten short of its scheduled slot. I had proposed a direction. Every person in the room said some version of yes. One junior staff member opened her mouth, started to speak, then stopped — the section chief beside her had placed a hand lightly on her forearm. I saw it. I said nothing.

Walking out afterward, I replayed the proposal in my head. Was there actually nothing to question? One of the supporting premises rested on an assumption I had not verified. As a reviewer, I would have flagged exactly that. No one in the room had. I caught it myself, alone in a hallway, too late to use it.

One of the things I learned during recovery from the justice disease was that my judgments were corrected by friction with other people. Escaping binary thinking required being asked — again and again — to articulate the reasoning behind a decision out loud. Those challenges were the mechanism. They are nearly gone now.

What Power Does ── The Power Paradox

Social psychologist Dacher Keltner spent decades studying what happens to people who acquire power. His synthesis, published in The Power Paradox (2016), documented a consistent pattern: power reduces sensitivity to others' emotions, weakens impulse control, and degrades empathic accuracy. What makes this paradoxical is that the people experiencing these changes generally do not notice them. The capacities that helped them gain power are being eroded by the act of holding it.

There is a neurological dimension to this. The subjective sense of power activates dopamine systems, producing elevated optimism and heightened confidence. These states can improve decision speed and initiative. But they also reinforce a prior: my judgment is likely correct. When that prior grows strong enough, incoming signals that contradict it get processed less carefully. Overconfidence in those with power is not an accident of temperament. It is structurally generated.

Keltner's central claim is that the social and moral sensitivities that enabled power's acquisition are progressively lost through the act of holding it — not as a failure of character, but as a structural consequence of the position. (The Power Paradox, 2016)

I recognize this structure. During the justice disease years, something similar operated: accumulated certainty about what was right progressively shortened the time between receiving a submission and forming a judgment. The channel for incoming correction was narrowing. What power now produces is the same narrowing — more quietly, across a wider domain, with fewer external forces capable of reopening it.

The Cognition of the Powerholder ── Kipnis's Findings

Organizational psychologist David Kipnis ran a series of studies in the 1970s and 80s on how managers with authority perceive subordinates. A consistent finding: when managers believed their instructions had caused subordinates to act, they attributed the outcomes to their own direction rather than to subordinate skill or effort. They also devalued subordinates' autonomous capability. Power automatically generates a bias that makes the contributions of others less visible.

The implications cascade. If the executive devalues subordinate judgment, advice and objections from below are implicitly discounted. Subordinates, reading this accurately, reduce the frequency and directness of dissent. The feedback loop closes. The executive is not receiving bad-faith silence — they are receiving the rational response of a group that has correctly identified the cost of speaking up. No one in the system is acting maliciously. The information flow distorts anyway.

The section chief who touched the junior staff member's arm was not shutting her down deliberately. He was protecting her from a cost he knew she might not have mapped. The organization was functioning as designed. The problem is that it was designed — implicitly, over time — around my presence at the top.

Three Faces of Silence ── Why Correction Doesn't Arrive

These three are not independent. Hierarchical deference provides the foundation; groupthink generates the atmosphere; the weight of prior success applies the seal. Eliminate one and the other two continue operating. An executive who believes they have built an open culture may be living inside all three simultaneously — not through anyone's bad faith, but through the cumulative logic of the system.

A Familiar Neighbor ── Connection to the Overconfidence Series

Research on overconfidence has documented a pattern that became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: people with lower competence in a domain tend to overestimate their performance, while high performers tend to underestimate theirs. The executive risk does not map neatly onto either side of that curve. Power generates overconfidence through a separate pathway — not from ignorance of one's limits, but from a reduction in the incoming signals that would make those limits visible.

Metacognition researcher John Flavell described the structure of metacognitive activity as two related operations: monitoring — tracking what one is and is not processing correctly — and control — adjusting cognitive strategy in response to what monitoring reveals. What power erodes is primarily the monitoring function. When information is filtered before it reaches you, when objections are internalized by others before being voiced, the raw material for monitoring disappears. The will to self-correct can remain intact and still produce nothing useful, because there is nothing to correct against.

During the justice disease years, the failure was also primarily a monitoring failure. I was not correcting my judgments because I was not receiving accurate feedback about what my judgments were producing. The mechanism then was internal — a bias built from accumulated certainty about rules. The mechanism now is structural — filtered through the social dynamics of the organization. The experience is different. The underlying failure is the same.

The Metacognitive Landscape ── Then and Now

What this comparison reveals is that metacognition during the reviewer years was substantially scaffolded by the institutional environment. The effort I made was real, but the structure made that effort productive. As an executive, the scaffold is gone. Monitoring one's own judgment becomes a more deliberate, more solitary task — one that the environment will not prompt and the calendar will not protect.

Building the Mechanism Yourself

Ronald Heifetz describes what he calls the ability to "get on the balcony" — to step back from the floor of activity and observe the system, including one's own behavior within it, from an elevated vantage point. The difficulty is that the executive is always also on the floor. The challenge is not to choose one perspective over the other, but to maintain both simultaneously. Without external corrective input, sustaining the balcony view alone is difficult in practice.

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety demonstrated that the culture in which people can voice failures and objections is strongly predictive of organizational learning capacity. But the research also shows that the formation of that culture depends critically on leader behavior — specifically, whether the leader models intellectual humility: saying "I don't know," receiving correction without defensiveness, asking questions more than announcing answers. Saying "please speak up" while acting as though you already have the answer does not produce psychological safety. It produces its performance.

Embedding Structure, Not Relying on Intention

Intention is not sufficient. I made a structural change: once a month, I meet one-to-one with someone outside the organization — a person with no stake in agreeing with me. In that conversation, I arrive not as the person with answers, but as someone holding questions I cannot yet resolve. The conversation does not always yield solutions. But it reliably reactivates monitoring. It is an imperfect substitute for the friction I have otherwise lost. It is also the closest thing to a balcony I can currently construct.

My Past Self as Teacher

When I think back to what stopped me during the justice disease years, two moments come forward. One: a submitter who kept asking, over several meetings, not 'can you reconsider?' but 'what exactly is the reasoning?' The repeated demand to articulate, to expose the logic rather than state the conclusion, put cracks in certainties I had not examined. Two: a supervisor who said, once, in passing: 'Your reasoning has a basis. Is it the complete basis?' That question did more than pages of formal feedback.

As an executive, I must generate the equivalent of those questions myself, or engineer the conditions in which they can arrive from others. This is not an evolution from that earlier experience. It is adaptation to a changed environment. The person who recovered from justice disease — who learned to see gray, to hold uncertainty, to check their own certainties — now faces a structure in which power systematically works to re-close that aperture. The earlier experience at least provides a map of what closure feels like from the inside.

A week after the morning meeting, I called the junior staff member in, one-to-one. I told her I had noticed she started to say something and asked if she would share it now. She was quiet for a moment. Then she began, slowly, to describe a concern about an assumption in the proposal. Her concern was almost identical to the one I had surfaced for myself, walking alone in the hallway. The friction had not disappeared. It had just moved somewhere I could not reach without going to find it.

The gray-zone perception I recovered during the justice disease years is not a permanent acquisition. It requires conditions to stay active — and the conditions of executive power systematically degrade those conditions. Corrective signals are filtered before they arrive. Silence becomes the organization's grammar. Past success accumulates as a kind of insulation. Keltner and Kipnis described a structural dynamic, not a character flaw. The process runs whether or not the executive is aware of it, and awareness alone does not stop it.

The metacognition that functioned during the reviewer years was scaffolded by institutional structure. That scaffold is gone. Monitoring one's own judgment now requires deliberate design: regular outside contact, the modeled willingness to say 'I don't know,' the explicit invitation for dissent that is backed by behavioral evidence that dissent is safe. Heifetz's balcony, Edmondson's psychological safety — both point at the same problem: how does a person holding power keep the channels through which their judgment could be corrected genuinely open?

Whether I can be stopped when I need to be stopped — that is the question this role is constantly asking. The justice disease years taught me that the strength of a conviction can function as a warning signal rather than a proof of correctness. That lesson does not expire at the executive level. If anything, it applies with more force. Having been through that earlier experience means I have at least some felt sense of what closure from within looks like. That is not enough. But it is the only advantage I have.