Agile Coaching Skills
Applied with a High or Low Agency Mindset?
Lately I’ve been introduced to the term agency. As in—I have agency, or I’m taking your agency. I wasn’t sure about the meaning, so I looked it up and found this—
Agency is notoriously hard to define, but here’s a pretty good working definition:
Agency is the belief in your ability to positively influence yourself and the world around you.
As a belief, agency is less inherited and fixed than a personality trait like extraversion, but more stable and domain-general than a specific mood or emotion.
I tend to think about agency as a mindset—a relatively stable but malleable way of thinking that has a strong influence over the thoughts and feelings we experience as well as how we behave.
To give this a little more color, it’s helpful to look at the extreme ends of the agency spectrum:
· People with a low agency mindset tend to be passive, reactive, and fatalistic. They see life as something that happens to them over which they have little control or responsibility. They frequently feel like a victim of circumstances and tend to see themselves as a supporting character in other people’s stories.
· People with a high agency mindset are active, enthusiastic, and optimistic. They view life as something they do over which they have great control and responsibility. They view themselves as the hero and author of their own story.
It’s worth mentioning that there are plenty of structural factors in our lives that increase the odds of our having a high or low agency mindset. But it’s my experience that everyone has the potential to cultivate significantly more agency in their life if that’s something they are motivated to do.
While it’s a rather long definition, I felt it did a great job of establishing a groundwork for the term. I found the definition in a rather lengthy article titled "The High Agency Mindset" by Nick Wignall.
As I read the article, it dawned on me that this notion of high and low agency applied well to Agile Coaches. It made me increase my definition of Self-Mastery from an Agile Coaching Growth Wheel perspective to include it.
It also made me reflect on my interactions with so many professional Agile Coaches in their client contexts. In a nutshell, I felt that we (most of us) have room to grow with respect to our high agency mindsets.
I’m wondering how you feel about that.
Another Perspective
I saw this post from Gene Gendel announcing a meetup with Dave Snowden. I thought the abstract aligned nicely with this post—
https://thecynefin.co/a-new-animism/
Please, make a note of the following virtual event with Professor Snowden, on November 7, 2025: “Reclaiming Human Sense-Making in an Age of AI Worship”.
In his recent blog “A New Animism”, Dr. Dave Snowden warns that society is slipping back into a kind of digital animism—treating AI as if it were a sentient being rather than a human-made tool. He argues that people increasingly speak of “what the AI decides” as though it holds independent agency, allowing us to escape responsibility for its outputs and errors. This fetishization of AI dulls critical thinking, replacing understanding with reverence.
Dr. Snowden urges a deliberate return to craftsmanship and scrutiny. Instead of worshipping algorithms, we should expose their workings, question their assumptions, and acknowledge their limitations. He calls for practices that preserve human judgment—demanding transparency about models and data, designing systems that anticipate failure, and slowing the rush to automation. The essay ultimately challenges readers to reclaim agency: to stop treating machines as oracles and start treating them as tools that serve human purpose, not define it.”
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob.