It’s true that the average income in Bahrain is much higher than in Egypt and Tunisia. But we make a mistake in thinking that the citizens’ movements in Egypt and Tunisia are about jobs and higher incomes. Or even food prices. These are serious concerns but not likely the most compelling reasons to risk one’s life. The protests represent a much deeper drive in us humans. Certainly, freedom and security count. But even more basic to us is the deep drive to exercise agency in meaningful, contributing ways. We all want to effect changes within our environments. We are most alive when what we do makes a difference in the world.
Human agency is the capacity to make choices and impress those choices into the world. Agency is often contrasted with natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking, deterministic processes. In this respect, agency is distinct from the idea of free will. Human agency is based in the claim that we do, in fact, make decisions and enact them on or into the world.
The capacity to act as an agent is personal to each and every human being. Some of us pursue outcomes to benefit our own lives; but others of us invest in the moral components of situations that extend beyond us. We wish to be the agents of actions that effect outcomes beyond our personal benefit. If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, then a person who wants to exercise agency feels duty bound to take into consideration the consequences of decisions and to be held responsible for them. Agency entitles an observer to ask should this have occurred?
Human agency is rarely considered in business. But if you define responsibility as advancing the working of all living systems such that they are more able to realize their full potential and make their greatest contribution , and if you extend this to the whole living system of Earth, then agency is a matter of every business’s responsibility. To feel fully human, in our basic nature, we need to engage in ways that include making choices, impressing them onto the environment, and reflecting on the consequences. Taking this into account is to the advantage of businesses and democracies.
Most work and management systems do not foster the full experience and benefits that result from agency, which is thwarted by “delegation,” “performance reviews,” and “incentives and rewards” used to guide behavior. The management systems that awaken, develop, and benefit from human agency are radically different than even the most advanced work systems today.
When Colgate Palmolive, Africa asked its workforce to design ways of working that would preserve the business during the forming of the new South African government—and to do so in ways that would improve life in the townships—they provided the aims needed for such work systems to emerge. They connected teams to particular external aims, mixing roles and levels as well as tribes. They combined a charter to improve distributors’ and consumers’ lives with improvements in the ways they did business, so that they could become a contributor to the new South Africa. To be charged with the aim to simultaneously improve economic conditions and national governance electrified the Colgate workforce.
Colgate eliminated hierarchies of people and replaced them with hierarchies of effectiveness, measured externally with stakeholders. When any business in any place and time wants to be fully responsible, it will redesign all its work systems to fuel, develop, and create powerful aims for agency. Such efforts also strengthen nations by strengthening their abilities to work as participating democracies, rather than only representative ones.
There is much more of the Colgate, Africa story in my new book, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Business, which will be released later this month and is available for purchase now at Amazon.com.
Increasing numbers of other thinkers are also calling for shifts in ways of running businesses, economies, and nations based on human agency. They include Umair Haque in The New Capitalist Manifesto and John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison in The Power of Pull.