Agency and Laziness
Netflix is streaming their limited series "The Diplomat," which follows an American power couple who have an interest and ability to shape global issues. I stopped watching in the middle of Season 3 largely from exhaustion with scenes where someone (usually one of the power couple; sometimes to each other) would walk through a line of thinking that connected some obscure happening in one part of the world to a clear game-changing development in world peace OR environmental impact OR some other high profile issue for which power couples slow or reverse the hand on the Doomsday Clock.
"You may think that this is just a sleepy factory in the middle of nowhere, but this drives interest such-and-such a player in such-and-such a region which (repeat x 3)... so it will bring peace between nuclear powers OR compliance to rogue nations OR cooperation from large-but-shady malicious actors."
My viewing was poorly timed as I had also been reluctantly reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Revenge of the Tipping Point," where the phrase, "this may have you think [SUCH AND SUCH], but you couldn't be farther from the truth."
Earlier this week, a Daniel Pink post came across my feed whereby he claims that “agency” was the most important skill for the future. He asserts that we need people who are not afraid to do stuff, even when others say it is imprudent or not possible. RECALL: The Wright Brothers (his example) did this when they launched air travel.
All to say, I was well primed when I caught a thread with much specific criticism about Pink’s post AND general criticism about the devolution of LinkedIn content.
Laziness seemed to be the complaint: It is not that simple. It is not just ONE thing. Why are you doing this? Why are we enabling this?
To put a little more cognitive effort into decoupling some of the connections shaping the role of agency in our complicated world, here are some questions that may counter our natural tendency to do less thining.
Where do people get the confidence and courage to act?
It is totally reasonable to assume that "having power" and "having courage" rise and fall in tandem. Terms like “fortune favours the brave” come to mind, which has me consider some of the systematic sources of power that I am learning to identify and question.
How do people get the confidence to know that what the do is indeed a "good thing" to have done?
A turn of phrase that I learned from Jeff Booth is that confidence is the warm feeling that appears right before one receives all the information.
To make use of a metaphor: Right as some courageous person is about to act, they get a notification of a delivery. The newly arrived information package would provide pause for thought about unintended but very predictable negative consequences. A lot hinges on whether they even open the box, and on whether they will have any accountability for such consequences should they come to pass. (Such courageous people are often good at leaving others holding bags.)
What are you trying to affect with this all-important agency?
Consider the intellectual space between trying to change something (e.g. I want my living space to be warmer in the winter) and adapting to work within the status quo (e.g. putting on a sweater).
Is there a precursor to "agency" that talks about sharing ideas with others with confidence and optimism, but also with humility and skepticism?
I would rather see more of that than the already emboldened becoming more so and, THROUGH THEIR AGENCY, creating more problems. Not surprisingly, there is a self-fulfilling nature to this because the ensuing problems give rise to more issues that they will decide need to be addressed... by more of their actions.