Two months ago Johnnie Moore wrote an unusually thought-provoking post over on LinkedIn referencing Stephen Covey’s circles of control, influence and concern:
‘More and more, I think our culture and technology is dragging our fragmented attention further and further away from what we can influence. I know I can easily be lured into excitable content about political phenomena far away from anything I can do much about. It’s as if we’re all being invited to think about <insert political challenge here>, as if we are in the room with those who do have – at least some – capacity to change things.’
Not long before reading Johnnie’s post I’d come across the work of the pollster James Kanagasooriam whose research and writing admirably captures why the concept of ‘agency’ could well be a defining megatrend of our times. He talks about all its manifestations in this episode of Amol Rajan’s podcast, and this post which kicked it all off (and which is quite the read).
James quotes Cate Hall’s definition of agency as: ‘The ability to see and act on the degrees of freedom that anyone has… manifest determination to make things happen.’ According to their Focaldata polling, when asked about how much freedom of choice and control they feel they have over how their lives turn out, roughly 20-30% of the UK public think that they are without agency. Quite the stat. This feeling of things happening to us rather than falling within our control or even influence has combined with genuine economic growth challenges and declines in living standards to lead significant cohorts within many Western democracies to self-define as being ‘left-behind’ (what James calls the ‘Nietzschean Trap’).
James features a lot of fascinating data on the different ways in which people feel left-behind, and the psychological thought-patterns that seem to be behind this. His analysis shows that our sense of control moves together with optimism and trust in a cluster he calls the OATs (people with optimism, high-agency behaviour and trust in others).
But the analysis also shows that things like money, home ownership and inheritance matter a great deal to happiness, which would seem to indicate that the concept of agency is both material and psychological, with each potentially shaping the other. In the 1966 the psychologist Julian Rotter set out the idea of the ‘locus of control’, or the degree to which people believe that outcomes depend on their own actions rather than on luck or on others. He believed that this outlook predicted individuals’ behaviour in ways that circumstances alone did not. This was an idea that was taken further by Martin Seligman’s concept of learned helplessness, in which repeated experience of having no control can teach people to stop trying, even after control has become possible again. Seligman, and his co-author Steven Maier, later updated their theory to argue that passivity is the default response to prolonged adversity and what has to be learned is that control is possible. Based on this, it would seem that constant challenges (or perceived challenges) can leave us feeling helpless, and helplessness can leave us less able to use whatever tools and room that we have. Which means that a lack of agency can be a negative cycle rather than a question of character.
If helplessness is at least partly learned, Johnnie’s point about the circle of concern becoming larger suddenly feels very relevant. And technology has consistently worked to enlarge our circle of concern. In 1854, ten years after the telegraph was invented, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his book Walden: ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate’. Over a hundred years later, Neil Postman argued in his book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ that the telegraph had broken the link between information and action. Before its invention, most of what people knew and which shaped what they did was drawn from local sources. The telegraph exploded that by bringing news from far away that people could do nothing about. Postman called this phenomenon the information-action ratio, noting how every new medium pushed this further out of balance. The modern version of this is the algorithmic feed. War, the consequences of war, elections in other countries, politicians from across the world, random ‘celebrities’, apocalyptic AI predictions, are all presented to us with the same level of emotional urgency as something that is happening down our street. The circle of concern widens every time we look at our phones, but the circle of influence seems to remain stubbornly fixed.
AI is just the latest in a long line of technologies to arrive in that outer circle. And the irony is that now we’re building increasing degrees of agency into software. This should give us pause to reflect on what happens to our capacity to act when more of that acting is delegated. Johnnie said in his post that AI is multiplying the capacity to generate plausible strategy documents but they often leave him feeling a bit empty. I often feel the same whenever I look at LinkedIn these days. Businesses, says Johnnie, are at risk of losing their capacity to feel, at their metaphorical fingertips, what is really going on around them. The Germans (who have a word for most things) have a word for this. Fingerspitzengefühl, often applied in a military sense, means an intuitive situational feel for what’s happening and what to do next. It’s built through direct contact and repeated action rather than analysis from a distance. When it’s so easy to generate a plausible strategy document the risk is that it has been created without any real sense of situational awareness but also that the document starts to stand in for the doing. The planning muscle can weaken in the same way the thinking muscle can. But the doing muscle is the one that tells us what’s really going on and the one that maintains our feeling of agency.
If agency grows through action, the question becomes how we can create more opportunities to act. In 1984, the organisational psychologist Karl Weick argued (in a paper called ‘Small Wins’) that when problems are framed at vast scale, the stakes feel so high and the task so large that people freeze. Breaking even the largest problem down into winnable pieces enables action, progress and builds momentum. Each small win shows that action is possible and makes the next one easier. It’s like Seligman’s cycle but in reverse. This can be particularly powerful when we do it with others. The sociologist Robert Sampson found that neighbourhoods where people shared a willingness to act on local problems (something he called collective efficacy) fared better than their circumstances alone would predict. Agency, it seems, can be a team sport.
At a macro-level this is a useful principle for tackling the ever-widening gap between the circle of influence and an expanding circle of concern. But it also speaks to how we can protect agency and motivation in the context of the rapid growth of AI agents. In her short 1983 paper the ‘Ironies of Automation’ (which I’ve referenced before) engineering psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge noted that automating the routine parts of a job doesn’t remove the human, it just changes their role. People are left monitoring and checking a system, only stepping in when it fails, but because they no longer do the work day-to-day, the skills and situational feel they need for those moments of failure fade over time. The more reliable the automation, the less practised the person who needs to step in when things go wrong.
So designing for agency means being deliberate about what we hand over. There is a difference between verification and judgement, and we need to protect human judgement and active involvement, and not be left with simply reviewing. Use AI to challenge and explain, not just to execute and produce. Give people a say in what gets delegated. And make sure to keep doing enough of the real work to hold on to that fingertip feel that is so vital.
Johnnie ended his post by noting that people feel hungry for human connection. Somewhere away from the targets and the strategy. That may be the best place to start. There’s little we can do about what ends up in our feeds, but the people and problems in front of us are well within reach, and that’s where agency gets rebuilt.
A version of this post appeared on my weekly Substack of AI and digital trends, and transformation insights. To join our community of over thirteen thousand subscribers you can sign up to that here.
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