Agency vs. Control: Helping Others Navigate Complexity
It’s no secret that humans like to be in control. Particularly in Western culture, there’s much chatter around empowerment, personal freedom, designing your ideal life and career, but the problem is, we often don’t accurately evaluate what exactly it is we have control over.
Unexpected personal or collective tragedies have a way of knocking us off our game and it’s natural for the first response to be feeling like we’ve lost control. I’d argue that these experiences merely shine a light to show us how our feelings of being in control were always an illusion.
Illusion or not, as humans, we conduct much of our mental business in perception and those perceptions can have real physical consequences. Studies have shown that increasing perceived autonomy among elders in nursing homes by increasing choice around daily activities vs the control group resulted in measurable, positive impacts on health metrics and mortality rates.
In our complex, interdependent work environments, seeking and maintaining control can be limiting. We might get stuck on one vision of a perfect outcome and getting locked in rigid thinking. Or, upon the inevitable realization of how little control we have over outcomes, we might decide to disengage and do nothing.
What if we acknowledge that our circle of direct control is much smaller than what we would like to believe, accept that as reality, and embrace agency instead?
Agency is our capacity for action. Agency says we can act independently and make free choices within the structure of our current context. Agency encompasses both what we can directly control and also what we have influence over.
If you find yourself flowing haphazardly down a river in a raft, agency is your ability to pick up the paddle and steer. Will you get knocked over by the rapids? Maybe, but with dedication, over time, you might also develop an ability to successfully navigate bigger and more intense rapids.
One of the greatest gifts you can give if you are a people leader is to help your team dig into the messiness of their current reality and help them see more clearly where their agency lies. Help them identify and list clearly what they have in their control, in their influence and what is left that is entirely uncontrollable. Once those realities are clear in our awareness, only then can we act from a place of empowered agency and let go of all that is not in our control.
