Previously, I wrote about how I moved from working at an AI startup to the government and a series on how I became involved in local organizing, both for the chinese-american community I was raised in and for general urbanism topics e.g. housing and (e-)biking.
From all these adventures, I’ve realized a few things:
The world is far more malleable than we give ourselves credit for.12
Nothing is worse than strong convictions not acted upon. Feeling frustrated with the brokenness of the world, but not having any agency in actually shifting it for the better, is incredibly alienating and frustrating (and yes, this describes many people on reddit/twitter)!3 The converse is that it is incredibly liberating and empowering to even have small windows of agency to change one’s local environment.
It took me a few years to understand what I cared about and how I could be effective in the issues I cared about. But surprise, surprise - one person is not enough! Which brings me to the current question that I want to explore here:
how do you increase the agency of the people around you?
I’m increasingly convinced that this is the right meta question for Changing-The-World. I had spent the past several years thinking about (and acting upon!) the question of “how do I have an impact on things I care about”. But there is an individual-sized asymptote to how much you can do through answering that question. Especially as I embarked on all the adventures I wrote about previously, the coordination problems quickly scaled and I often wished I had more co-conspirators and partners in crime who I could work with and rely on. The “next level” I’m interested now is in how to raise the collective agency of people around you, with varying degrees of alignment and directionality.
I came up with a 2x2 framework4 to categorize different ways to boost agency from personal experiences I’m familiar with. The 2x2 is framed along the axes of:
whether you want to generally increase agency or increase people’s agency in certain areas/ways (directed vs undirected respectively)
whether you think agency is an unqualified positive virtue to be cultivated or requires a more contrarian spark / opinionated take on agency to pull someone out of a standard, less-agentic pathway (positive vs negative respectively)
The 4 quadrants in the 2x2 are:
Positive-Undirected (“Just Do It”): some form of validation or positive social pressure supporting someone’s nascent idea, independent of the idea itself.
e.g. Emergent Ventures, Socratica, hackathonsPositive-Directed (“Communal Pathways”): increasing people’s involvement for a particular topic or cause by giving them access to a community of likeminded people who are actively involved and painting a concrete theory of change/mode of agency
e.g. YIMBY Action, tech-to-policy fellowships like TechCongress, effective altruism organizingNegative-Directed (“The Road Less Taken”): opinionated takes on certain forms of agency and creating a gravitational pull towards scarce types of agency/agentic framing
e.g. Thiel Fellowship, NucleateNegative-Undirected (“Break the Mold”): how to provoke more agency in people, with the underlying view that greater agency requires some contrarian realization
e.g. Alexey Guzey’s practice of responding to people who say “I should do X” with “Why aren’t you doing X”, Bridgewater Radical Transparency, Hamming Question
A few observations that stand out from the 2x2:
It is striking that community building is the fastest way to boostrap directed forms of agency boosting. I’d be curious if there is is writing on techniques for community organizers specifically around how to increase agency?5 The Socratica guide is by far the best one I know of, but I’d love to see more examples!
Negative-undirected seems to be an unpopular quadrant in this 2x2? I’m guessing this may be because positive affirmation is both empowering and generates good will, whereas it is a far more difficult to pull this off with negative feedback. Perhaps an area ripe for new practices!Edited on 03/24/24 (one day after sending): my complete omission of the Hamming question I think addresses this now forgone observation
And some related questions for next time (or for you to think and blog about!):
what leads to someone holding an undeservedly high view of their own agency and how does one guard against that?
e.g senior level public officials who believe they are making an impact but in reality are just stirring the pothow do we not only cultivate agency, but agency paired with a good theory of change?
e.g. environmentalist groups who have been traditionally good at movement building but have not updated to the needs of the energy transitionhow does the language we use convey different agentic framing?
e.g. recent Sacasas essay on online “addiction” discourse vs framing online behavior as compulsion and habit; when we say “I have to” go to something vs “I get to”, growth mindsethow does the attention economy intersect with our collective sense of agency? 6
e.g. the emergent rise of doomerism content on social media platforms as a way to keep users scrolling is also a mind virus that destroys any sense of agency; some liberal art degrees that explicate problems from every perspective but provide no framework for solutionsMore broadly, how does narrative crafting shape different framings of agency?
e.g. the elevated role of the startup founder, effective altruism and utilitarianismI didn’t explore this angle because it is a bit more abstract compared to tangible practices for agency boosting, but this is another perspective on how agency is crafted that I think is worth further exploration. To tie this to one of the first ideas in this post:
If the world is malleable, in what ways is it malleable and to what ends should it be shaped?7
These are just some initial thoughts - I am very much still searching for more examples or ideas for how to increase agency in the world and ways to conceptualize agency! Thanks to
and for sparking this post and for reading a draft, all bad ideas are my ownI do believe this to be true. But I am also cognizant that this idea, like many important ideas, has a self-determined truth value. I don’t actually know if one could “objectively” say the world is malleable, but it sure seems a lot more malleable to people who believe it. In other words, some beliefs can be so powerful, the world itself bends to conform with your belief.
I am sure this is not a new idea…if someone has a more eloquent and original reference, please do share!
A corollary to this is that one can have agency in any position or situation - there is no excuse for “I am not X enough to do anything”. People in any position and stage of life can have an outsized impact if they are high agency, despite what prevailing narratives of hierarchical power or conceptions of impact might be. Having been in the unique position of both being another cog in the federal bureaucracy running paperwork for projects and also leading senior-level interagency initiatives, I’ve seen how independent of the official hierarchy, the whole ship runs independent of the org chart on the basis of the agency of different individuals. Hopefully will be writing more lessons learned here soon!
From the always insightful and pithy
: “I think about knowledge as debt, and action as paying it off. You have to do things to deplete the toxin or it will just built up in your body”I’ve been spending a lot of time with colleagues at work who are ex-McKinsey and I’d like to think some of their skills have rubbed off!
I know many community organizers probably refer to this as “moving up the ladder of engagement”, but that feels like too narrow and instrumental of a perspective to be complete?
“Everyone is talking about the missile gap - what we really need to be talking about is the agency gap”
“We need a Strategic Agency Reserve”
“The Federal Reserve raised agentic media rates again this quarter in an attempt to jumpstart flagging productivity and GDP growth”
“American Dynamism as agency boosting”
The narrative crafting work of shaping modes of agency is usually best done in the Directed half of the 2x2. For “Negative-Directed”, it is usually elevating an underrated form of agency universally e.g. getting more people to found startups (though I would say it is debatable if that is really a neglected form of agency in the US). “Positive-Directed” tends to provide more contextualized agentic framings. For example, one of the primary contributions of Saul Griffith’s Electrify book, a self-described “optimist playbook” for climate, is that the appendix lists out how every profession and career can make a different for climate change. Similarly, EA communities have been very good at identifying sets of pathways and shifting the trajectory of young people to build careers off their set of pathways.
We are constantly in a war of narrative crafting, with different groups striving to capture other agents, not through coercive or physical means, but by shifting, diffusing, molding their agentic framing.