The Asymmetry of Power: Why the Field Hates a Winner It Can’t Control

This is Week 12 in a 12 Week Series on Systems-based Leadership.

I watched the recent March Madness fallout not as a fan, but as a systems leader.

When a legendary coach publicly confronts Dawn Staley with a level of vitriol that feels disproportionate to the moment, the easiest explanation is personality. Rivalry. Competitive fire.

But that explanation is too small for what actually happened.

What unfolded around Dawn Staley is a visible example of something most leaders experience in private:

A system reacting to disruption.

In my work, I use a simple idea from physics to make sense of moments like this: every system has a field, and every field has gravity. That gravity shapes what leadership is supposed to look like, how authority is expressed, and what kinds of success feel acceptable within the system. Most of the time, that gravity is invisible because people move within it. The gravity only becomes visible when someone bends it.

Dawn Staley did not just win games. Dawn Staley disrupted expectations about how authority shows up while winning those games. That disruption is what made the moment volatile.

The response to that disruption followed a familiar pattern. The public critique did not remain anchored to strategy, execution, or results. The critique moved to interpretation of the person: tone, demeanor, control, intent. The conversation shifted away from basketball decisions and toward judgments about who Dawn Staley is as a leader.

That shift is not random.

That shift is how systems stabilize themselves when their internal expectations are challenged.

For leaders working inside organizations, the same pattern often unfolds without cameras or headlines.

A leader begins pushing for meaningful change—improving outcomes, challenging stagnation, trying to move the system beyond what it has historically produced. At first, the conversation stays anchored to the work, such as results, decisions, execution on the court.

Then something changes.

The conversation begins to move. Feedback becomes less about the work and more about interpretation. Words like “tone,” “fit,” “alignment,” or “approach” begin to surface. The evaluation subtly shifts from what the leader is doing to who the leader is.

Many leaders do not have language for that shift. Without language, the experience becomes confusing. The natural response is to work harder, communicate more clearly, or refine strategy. And yet, despite increased effort, the environment feels more unstable, not less.

That instability is often misdiagnosed.

The instability is not always a failure of leadership execution.

The instability can be a signal that the leader is no longer moving with the natural path of the system.

In physics, the natural path of a system is called a geodesic—the direction things move when nothing interrupts them. In organizations, geodesics show up as 

*inherited expectations, 

*informal rules, and 

*unspoken agreements about how leadership operates. 

Those paths are efficient, but they are also conservative. They are designed to preserve continuity, not transformation.

When a leader attempts to move an organization in a direction that departs from those paths, the system does not simply resist the idea. The system produces friction around the person advancing the change.

Dawn Staley encountered that friction in public.

Many social change leaders encounter the same friction in private.

And without a way to interpret that friction, the experience often becomes personal. Leaders begin to question their judgment, their communication, or their capacity. The system remains unexamined, while the leader absorbs the weight of the misalignment.

This is where systems leadership becomes necessary.

If leaders do not understand that the field exists—if leaders do not understand the mechanics of how systems preserve themselves—then the only available response is effort. More work. More communication. More strategy.

But effort alone cannot overcome a system whose underlying mechanics have not been addressed.

Leaders who are trying to produce meaningful change need more than skill.

Leaders who are trying to produce meaningful change need a way to see the field itself—what the system produces, what the system protects, and how the system responds when its expectations are disrupted.

Without that visibility, even the most committed leaders can find themselves working harder while producing less, pushing further while encountering more resistance, and leading more intentionally while experiencing more instability.

What happened to Dawn Staley is not an isolated moment.

What happened to Dawn Staley is a visible example of a pattern that plays out across organizations every day—especially for leaders attempting to do real social change work.