TWH#40: The Ability to Act

“A year from now, you will wish you had started today.” —Karen Lamb

Every time I introduce myself during an interview or coaching discovery call, I invariably refer to my first experience at a high-growth startup as “lots of learning, lots of headaches”.

By headaches I’m not referring to tough business or technical challenges—although we had plenty of those. Instead, what is seared in my mind is the interpersonal conflict that I experienced particularly towards the end of my journey in that company. Today I’m grateful to be friends with everyone that made my life difficult back then.

Or did they?

How much was them making my life difficult versus how much me not doing myself any favors? I was certainly frustrated by a lot that I imputed to others (read: my superiors) who had the authority to change things. But the line between wanting to change things and wanting to change others is thin—and dangerous—to cross. Disappointment, frustration and anger beckon on the other side.

The Importance of Agency

Colin Breck, a Sr. Staff Systems Engineer at Tesla and one of my favorite online writers¹, points out that having autonomy, mastery and purpose (as per Daniel Pink’s Drive) is not enough. You also need agency.

Agency is the capacity to act. Agency is somewhat related to autonomy, but it is different. Autonomy is independence—the freedom to act without external control or influence. Autonomy does not necessarily imply agency—one could have independence without the capacity to act. When we lack agency, we lack the ability to act.

Colin goes on to highlight three major ways that agency can be taken away: when we fear making changes; when we lack jurisdiction; and when we lack ownership. All of these are paralyzing:

• If I’m afraid of making changes to a system, I tend to avoid taking that risk.

• If a piece of code “belongs” to someone else in my team, I’m discouraged from messing with it.

• If someone takes ownership of my work (e.g. speaks for/over me in a meeting), it blocks me.

In all these examples, I retain autonomy as I’m not being directly told what to do. But I lack agency because I’m not able to create action that produces a particular effect. In other words, independence without the ability to act.

While I agree with Colin on the distinction, it brings me exactly to the crux of this week’s post:

Is agency something you can expect to be given? Or is it rather a quality inherent to the individual, the degree of which is fully independent from external factors?

Taking Control

Why do I even care? Because burnout.

I do not believe burnout is primarly driven by working long hours but rather by lack of agency. Afterall, it’s not sustainable to feel that we are unable to make a diference, that we do not possess the ability to act in an impactful way.

But are we condemned to depend on others (or on “the organization”) for agency?

Mathematician and podcast host Eric Weinstein coined the term “high agency”² which he described to Tim Ferriss in 2016:

"When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?"³

A high agency mindset is entirely within our control, as it only depends on our thoughts and actions. The outcomes certainly not. Which means that having high agency might not be enough to get the result we want but that having low agency is guaranteed failure—and likely burnout.

I confess that in the earlier part of my engineering management career I tended towards a low agency mindset. Like things were happening “to me”, rather than “by me”.⁴ Interestingly, all the successes I had I can trace to moments where I tended towards high agency.

Over time, going through the school of hard knocks and a lot of reading, I learned a few tools that helped me shift more consistently towards a high-agency approach:

1. Focus on what you can (actually) control. As the ancient Stoics figured out many moons ago, life is divided into two (all-inclusive) categories: the things within our control, and those that are not.⁵ And we can only control ourselves—what we say, how we act, and how we react to what happens.
   
   Paradoxically, this is not nearly as limiting as it seems. Quite the contrary. For example, I can develop my communication and influence skills, become more curious about the way others think or what worries them, ask better questions, negotiate using a positive-sum mindset, etc. The list goes on. And, because it depends zero on others, it’s liberating.

2. Harness the power of reframing. As executive coach Ed Batista reminds us, “Our intellectual interpretation of situations in which we've encountered setbacks or made mistakes has a significant influence on our emotional experience.”⁶
   
   At one point in my last VP Engineering role I started feeling bored in leadership meetings, and my tendency was to “blame” others (in my mind!) for it. I was however able to reframe this as an opportunity to learn the skills needed to affect the dynamics of a meeting I wasn’t leading (the CEO was), and that re-energized me.

3. Remember that everyone puts on their pants one leg at a time. Steve Jobs once said, “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
   
   When I became part of senior leadership teams, I witnessed first hand how everyone was simply trying to figure things out. No one had it fully together. This made me realize that I was no more and no less, that I could learn whatever, and helped me increase my self-confidence and shift towards a higher agency mindset.

It’s important to remember that agency is not binary, but a spectrum. Sometimes, within the same day, you will find yourself acting from low agency in one situation and high agency in another. Ultimately, personal growth comes precisely from the effort we deliberately put into slowly moving the needle from “low” to “high”.

And that’s how we claim our ability to act. Intentionally, one bit at a time.

1. Colin’s blog is a treasure trove of thoughtful, well-crafted writing.

2. I also highly recommend Shreyas Doshi excellent post on the topic.

3. https://tim.blog/2016/01/13/eric-weinstein/

4. For more on this distinction, see the The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, as well as Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle.

5. In Stoic philosophy, this is The Dichotomy of Control, an instance of which is the Serenity Prayer used in the context of 12-step programs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, etc.

6. https://www.edbatista.com/2018/07/learning-how-to-learn.html