Years ago I was working as the sidekick of a seasoned project manager. He had the ability to turn around a room packed with skeptics. Initially nobody would believe what we asked for is possible, you could feel it in the air. But then something happened. When my senior colleague started outlining what we wanted to achieve, and HOW we could achieve it, a light switch turned on. He communicated „we can do more than we think“ with his mere presence, even when he had doubts himself. As people started to lean forward, you could see the teams confidence growing with every minute. Still new to the job I was fascinated by this magic of making things happen. It was back then, when I started working in a professional project management team, that I learned “agency” could be made a profession.
Some years later, on a typical workday, I sat in front of a large screen, running my complete workflow: milestones, roadmaps, work breakdowns, risk registers. I felt I had a good run when a buddy from electronics dropped by, dropping himself on the chair next to me. Taking a short but deep look at my screen, pausing for a moment and then looking at me, he asked: “You are also not achieving that much right now, aren’t you?”
He saw something I did not: all the tools on my screen were not able to compensate for a period where things were just not moving forward, as they sometimes do. His remark caught me off guard, as I was feeling in full command of my fate in that very moment. And that‘s my point here: feeling agentic and having a real impact are not the same things. We can only sense for the real world effects of our intentions and plans. And this „sense of agency“ is a sense that can be fooled like other senses.1 An inflated feeling of agency is an issue, at least for me. And thats what could be called an agency trap.2
Agency traps get more tangible in practical situations. On a camping trip, an agentic person might do the grocery planning for the trip, create a route and propose what to do and when. But then things actually need to be done. On the campground, somebody needs to get up, wash the dishes, buy new food and fix the leaking rain cover. In these moments, I noticed the performed agency of some people (sometimes including me) does not match their actual contribution. At the same time, some individuals usually less associated with „leadership“ style behavior may run the actual show when a thunderstorm is rolling in, a tentpole just broke and the pasta sauce threatens to burn.
You might define agency as the ability to formulate independent goals plus the will to pursue them.3 But to address simple practical issues (and most challenges can be broken down to simple practical issues) there is something else required. It’s an immediate impulse to fix the obvious issue at hand, right now. The kid might throw the cup down from the table? You reach out and move the cup out of reach. I think this immediate impulse to turn a given situation into a more desirable state RIGHT NOW, without any overhead can be called drive. And I think drive is complementary to agency. You need both drive AND agency. BUT: both our senses for drive and agency can be fooled.
An algorithmic infinity scroll feed is the prefect drive trap. With algorithms inspired by casino machines it observes your immediate reaction to presented content, anticipating what you might like next and sorting its queue accordingly, maximizing the grabbed attention per cat video. That’s what Smartphones and social media are doing to us every day. I think right now a lot of people yearn for agency because it seems like the only antidote to the corruption of our drive. Moving to a higher level of control appears to be the way to go. Hence, I think, so much interest for agency4 and hence the recent popularity of agency-oriented philosophies like Stoicism.
On the other hand a markdown based personal knowledge management system with a fancy graph view to filter all your atomic notes by date of creation, color coded by relevance to the yearly goals you defined and summarized by a local LLM and so on and so on... is the perfect agency trap. „Second Brains“, „Digital Zettelkasten“ and „Getting Things Done“ create scaffoldings that FEEL very agentic, but their actual contribution to reality is hard to measure. It’s difficult for me to acknowledge that agency is not the silver bullet I wanted it to be. I’m still convinced that developing agency is probably the best way to grow yourself personally. But our sense of agency has limits as our sense of drive has too. And I think there are products, companies, and actors trying to derail our sense of agency —not the least with the help of AI.
It is important to protect our drive system from corruption by installing the right filters, creating the right habits, maybe limiting phones to the status of a wrench-like tool5 which does not have to be held in hand all of the time. And agentic behaviour can certainly help to keep our drive in check: for example I successfully cut down my unintended social media usage to almost zero by installing a cooldown app that requires me to wait before I can access Instagram and other black holes (having to wait is annoying and that works).
But it is equally important to keep our sense of agency calibrated. Agency traps are harder to diffuse than drive traps because they operate on a higher perception level. Here it is tricky to realize that we ourselves are always a part6 of the problems we are trying to solve with our agency. With too much galaxy brain thinking, you will end up with a pretty solution model for everything, but will always lack the capacity to execute upon it.
I think right now a distorted sense of agency is a blindspot for most of us. As we are entering a new phase where “being more agentic” is considered the rescuing high ground for AI disruption and all the other things that worry us, I want to pay more attention to agency traps. That’s why I want to be more sensitive for when I am actually trying to achieve something, and when I am just trying to uphold my agentic identity.
“Doing the obvious next thing“ is the best antidote to agency larping I have found yet. Let go of plans, milestones and roadmaps and do the dishes instead. But I am sure there are more ways to protect our agency from corruption.
The basic sense of agency is construed as an online and phenomenologically rather thin experience that accompanies the performance of actions, and that does not necessarily require the presence of a conscious intention. Judgments about one’s agency, in contrast, are offline and usually post-act, and they are, thereby, subject to various biases that may distort the interpretation of one’s own agency. The feedback-comparator model is well suited to explain the basic sense of agency, whereas a self-interpretation theory, akin to Wegner’s, can explain why judgments about one’s own agency tend to be distorted or illusory under certain conditions (Bayne and Pacherie 2007; Gallagher 2007; Synofzik et al. 2008).” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/
“Regard your phone as you would a wrench: a tool to be kept in storage and brought out only for specific use. Use it only when you need to, then forget it exists.” From a substack note by Omar F. Najjarine
“The reason you’ll never get on top of everything is because you’re inextricably enmeshed in the “everything” you’ve been struggling to get on top of.” https://www.oliverburkeman.com/reality
A previous CEO / GM of my org handed out copies of the Culture Code. It’s one of those airplane business books. I read the intro and there’s an anecdote about how kindergartners outperformed MBAs in a brain teaser-ey group project to build a stable structure out of pasta or something like that. The MBAs did a lot of “planning” which was code for status games about who was in charge. The kindergartners just iterated without ego.