What is driving protest in Cairo? The Egyptian uprising has many causes, but I’m not talking about the usual assumptions. Certainly it is about a lack of freedom to choose one’s leader. And about brutality at the hands of a military that should be protecting its own people. And a lack of jobs that forces many young men to go to Lebanon for menial work as laborers in order to support their families. Beneath all of that lies a deeper reason: the rising of the human spirit, which refuses to be crushed, the exercise of human agency.
Human agency is the capacity to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is often described as the way of living through which people feel most alive. Watching the Egyptian people gathered in their streets, I get a strong sense that they are taking back their lives by reclaiming their agency. Egyptian leaders understand this to a degree, as shown by their first public response, to create an opportunity to talk. When we exercise agency, we are bolstered by having an effect.
I think this is also something corporations need to understand. Every individual wants to exercise choice and experience the aliveness that comes from choice. Agency can be a powerful force for creativity and innovation when it’s included in business design. When it’s not, it can be a drag on an organization.
I have long spoken of the exercise of personal agency and my work with corporations is founded on the idea of agency. Humans have a drive to express themselves and to do so uniquely at a core level.
How do businesses have responsibility and opportunity for fostering personal exercise of human agency toward meaningful pursuits? It takes a radically different management system. Delegation has to go. So do performance reviews, incentives and rewards, rating and ranking—and all of the feedback systems. What replaces these is agency-based work systems, including self-organizing teams connected to a meaningful and responsible strategies that can make things happen based on each person’s own unique capabilities.
One case example comes from the complete redesign of work at Kingsford Charcoal, a process that involved everyone. The initial focus was on developing individuals as the basis for business improvement. Kingford believed that each of their people was unique and therefore had something distinct and useful to contribute to business evolution. The business strategy had been well defined; they invited individuals to initiate their own improvements in the way work was organized and executed in order to achieve its objectives.
Kingsford’s structures, systems, and process were redesigned to support self-organizing and self-direction, enabling individuals and teams to work toward business ends without top-down direction. People were asked to exercise the systemic wisdom and critical thinking skills they had been developing and to make choices from the perspective of a business owner.
Make Promises Beyond Ableness
What drives such emerging ideas in an orderly way? The first change for agency-based work redesign was a developmental personal practice called promises beyond ableness. At Kingsford, every individual was expected to generate meaningful and significant ideas that would call on them to stretch beyond their current capabilities in order to contribute to the overall strategy. They did not have to stay within the bounds of their current jobs or roles. As they began to step outside them, they engaged others in order to gain alignment from the part of the organization they sought to affect. This is the way the Responsible Business ties the development of intelligence and expression to pursuing and achieving business strategy and market place non-displaceability.
At Kingsford, promises beyond ableness took the form of initiatives, projects, or targeted changes in work practices. Promises always came out of an opportunity or hazard about which the individual felt great passion, but they also met specific criteria. They always had to be rationally defended in terms of their relevance and significance to the corporate strategy and their effects on stakeholders. They had to include a rigorous plan for the time and resources required. They had to include systemic performance indices that could be measured with regard to the effect on the market, the business, the team, and the individual. And they had to challenge the individual with a significant demand for personal growth and professional learning.
The resulting personal development plan specified the work to be done and set up deliberative practices intended to ensure success. Individuals justified their plans and the resources required to a self-chosen team, all of whom would be affected by the promise and its delivery. This helped extend accountability and support beyond individuals into teams, which often found themselves drawing together in pursuit of large, compelling promises. Along the way, individuals led timely evaluations of their accomplishments, their learning, and the understanding they were developing of the next phase of planning and action.
Over time, individuals took on increasingly challenging and significant tasks, growing themselves and the contributions they could make. Through this process, workers were able to conceptualize and carry out transformations that affected the entire company. Promises beyond ableness became a critical factor in Kingsford’s rapid and strategic growth.
An increasing number of thinkers are speaking to this need for non-traditional management systems that speak to and awaken human agency, including Steve Denning in The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, Haley, Brown, and Davison in The Power of Pull, and Umair Haque in The New Capitalist Manifesto. Also see Mathew May’s post today.
Every one of us hungers for agency. With the advent of traditional work systems, the entrepreneurial spirit is tempered. With agency-based work design, that spirit reawakens. Agency-based design is a responsible way to run businesses because it gives employees, suppliers, and contractors opportunities to build really powerful companies.
And agency is what will continue to drive protests around the world—or it is what will be temporarily quieted, only to rise again another day.
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