Agency

Andrej Karpathy posted earlier this year about the importance of agency:

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

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It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

And this really hit me.  I realize that I had been conflating these attributes for years.   I’ve hired a lot of people and I always thought I was sorting for intelligence, but I now realize I was sorting for agency.  By far, the best people I have worked with had the quiet sense of agency that Karpathy mentions — a strong bias towards action, backed by strong reasoning.  Intelligence is critical — actions have to be motivated by a clear rationale and a clear sense of opportunity.   But intelligence must be coupled with agency.

I was gifted a certain amount of agency at birth — white, male, born in the USA in the 1960s, a family with a stable home and solid economics.  I never felt economically at risk in my life, and as I entered college and young adulthood, I knew I could take some risks and still have a place to sleep at night and food on the table.  If you don’t have this stability and safety net in your life, it is much much harder to take risks.  So I had some luck.

But I had no training on agency. I grew up going to public schools, and I certainly never heard anything about agency in my pre-college years.  School, church, Boy Scouts, teams — they all stressed following the rules, obeying your elders, and not causing any waves.  They all worked to suppress agency.  Undergraduate education was not much different — my engineering curriculum was pretty prescribed, and there weren’t many options to demonstrate or develop agency; I was pretty much on rails all the way through my BS degree.  

I have learned two basic things about developing agency over my career. And unfortunately, I didn't figure these out early in my career; rather, these are observations looking back. 

First, seek out purpose-driven organizations and work with high-agency people. The best way to develop a strong sense of agency is to be surrounded by it.

• I got my first real lesson on agency in my first year of graduate school.  In a processor architecture course, the professor asked the class a question about cache design choices in the first week or so, and we all sat there quietly, confused.  He looked at us all and let the silence hang.   And then he shut his book and said, “Well, that will be the test tomorrow.   This is your course and your education; you need to decide if you are going to put the effort in.”   And he left the room.  That woke me up (and most of the class).  I realized there were no guardrails left; it was up to me to dig in and get the most out of the opportunities in front of me.  No one was going to hold my hand.   I read a lot about cache design choices that night!
• I was lucky to work at Microsoft at a time when agency was rewarded and encouraged.  The company was a purpose-driven organization back then, and having a clear, stable purpose is critical to a sense of agency.  I was fortunate to work with a string of executives and peers at Microsoft who were fearless and driven; my first manager there took me aside in the first week of work and explained that the job was like baseball — I had to get up and swing. I would strike out a lot, but a .300 average would be great.  I’d be remiss not to mention Craig Eisler and the late Eric Engstrom, who maybe had surplus agency, but who showed how to get things done.  
• During my startup time, I learned to embrace the maxim of “strong opinions, weakly held”.  We had to be intensely purpose-driven to get anything done, while also constantly absorbing data and feedback from the world, and shifting plans as necessary.  Nothing teaches agency like the responsibility of a startup — no one else is going to solve your problems for you, you have to find the way forward.

Second, encourage and create agency in the people around you.  In your work life, encourage people to be leaders and take risks.  Push decision authority out to people.  Explain your own thinking and decisions, and help people learn from your experience.  Every time you need to decide for your team, it is kind of a failure; your team should be growing to make all the right decisions.

If you are a parent, be the rock for your kids to push off from.  Provide a stable foundation and allow them to take risks and learn to make their own decisions.  Provide the support for your partner to take risks and develop agency in their life — I’ve certainly had that support from Cristi, and I need to do better about supporting in return.  

It’s taken me to retirement age for this notion of agency to click.  I hope others figure it out sooner.