Becoming the architect of your life

...i + w + c = agency

There’s been a lot of Internet talk lately about the idea of high agency. Or maybe that’s just the tech Gods on high listening in to my conversations. It seems the common understanding of agency is that a person with high agency just has opinions that deviate from the norm.

But if everyone who has opinions that deviate from the norm actually acted on those opinions, we would live in a very different world. And changing a circumstance, outcome (or, by extension, the world) is the true power of high agency. This shows me that this mainstream definition is too reductive.

In contrast, my agency equation goes like this:

i + w + c = a

where

i = being intentional

w = wanting to do or change something

c = having the competence to follow through

and a = agency.

Today, I want to show you why this equation is so important.

There are a few areas in the working world where agency is prominent: investing, founding a business, being a scientist and writing etc usually require a high degree of agency. These people need to be intentional about putting something novel into the world; they have to want those insights to change some individual or mass behaviour; and they need the competence to actually translate those novel insights into cutting-edge research, investments, businesses or essays.

But a common argument against trying to cultivate more agency in the education system is that not every professional requires a high degree of agency to be good at their job. But, let’s be honest, if being good at your job were truly the most important metric by which we measure success and happiness in life, we’d be in big trouble. Oh, wait…

I believe that organisations fail when the majority of workers are low agency. Low agency slithers its way into an organisation slowly and then all at once (yes, I did just repurpose a John Green quote about love to illustrate the disintegration of the organisation - sue me). A former boss of mine disagreed that you should hire people for agency. He believed that you require a certain proportion of workers to be lower agency to get the more mundane work done and not get bored by it. While I agreed with the implication that high agency people need the opportunity to deploy their agency at work to feel fulfilled, I disagreed with the broader point. The reason? I believe that the multiplicative value of high agency can only have a wildly positive effect on your business. That’s because the growth of high agency is not linear. It’s exponential.

One high agency person + one high agency person does not equal two high agency people. It equals three high agency people.

That means that the “mundane” work that five low agency people have become accustomed to doing is actually perceived by one high agency person as an exciting opportunity to develop an efficient, automated system, such that the mundane work is eliminated or at least minimised. As I discuss in The Arc of Empowerment: From Individual Contributor to Agent of Change, “worker agency empowers individuals to move beyond mere task completion and embrace their ability to adapt, innovate and contribute unique perspectives and ideas”.

But even outside of the workplace, agency has the potential to transform someone’s life. Let’s take an extreme example. Imagine you’ve been on a plane crash in the middle of the Andes where miraculously most people have survived. Your degree of agency will dictate what role you play in the rescue mission. If you have the intention to survive + you want to change the fate of hundreds of passengers + you have the competence to think intelligently about what to do to maximise chances of survival, you will likely become the leader of the pack. This weakens the definition of agency that labels only loners and rebels as those with high agency. While loners and rebels often demonstrate traits of high agency, they do not (yet) possess the energetic or intellectual power to attract a pack around them. In short: they lack some element of c.

On the less extreme end of the spectrum, say you’re in the middle of a park and a random person is blasting music through their speaker. Everyone around you is getting annoyed, who the heck does this guy think he is? But if you’re honest with yourself, you’re actually quite enjoying it. You look around, get up and start dancing. That’s high agency. Once again: intention + wanting to do something + follow through = agency.

So, how do you identify high agency? One of the sure-fire ways to test for it, either in a job interview or when on a date with a prospective partner, is to determine your answer to this question: do they genuinely believe they are the architect of their own life?

In my eyes, the single biggest reason to focus on cultivating more agency in the education system and through parenting is to create more individuals who truly believe they are the architect of their life. The exponential effect this would have on the world as we know it is unfathomable.