More Agency
I’ve been thinking a lot about agency of late.
One reason is that Peter Fischbach and I are developing a more advanced version of our EBAC Agile Coaching Masterclass, and the centerpiece or foundation of the class is Agency in your Agile Coaching. In a word, we’re all over the agency right now.
So, when I saw this post from John Cutler titled “TBM 425: AI and Agency,” I was excited to read it.
Here’s a snippet from the article, but you really need to read it entirely—
Agency is not only individual.
Agency exists in an environment. Yet almost everything about how we talk about AI adoption treats it as a personal trait you either have or you don’t.
…
Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan) tells us that people need three things to be genuinely motivated: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Look at what we’re doing to all three.
· Autonomy. “Everyone will use AI.” Mandates replace choice. You’ve removed the very thing that makes adoption feel like agency instead of compliance.
· Competence. AI devalues hard-won skills while demanding new ones on someone else’s timeline. Skills like judgment, facilitation, synthesis, and craft are glossed over because they’re harder to see in an AI workflow. The message: what you were good at matters less now, and you’d better catch up fast.
· Relatedness. The individual “superpower” narrative rewards going solo. When one person can bypass the team, collaboration isn’t enhanced. It’s sidelined. People lose their connection to the group’s purpose.
The companies demanding AI adoption are systematically destroying the conditions that would make genuine adoption possible. Then they label the predictable result a mindset problem.
This is the exact moment that calls for collective continuous improvement. Learning together, experimenting safely, sharing what works, iterating on how the team operates. Instead, we’re navigating highly pathological environments, where trust is low, mandates are high, and the people best positioned to figure this out together have been stripped of the agency to do so.
So ask yourself:’
· Am I creating an environment where people can develop agency with AI, or am I mandating compliance and calling it adoption?
· When someone on my team pushes back on AI, do I treat that as a signal to listen to or a problem to fix?
· Can I articulate who specifically benefits from our AI push, and over what time horizon, and have I said that out loud to the people I’m asking to change?
Two things
John’s article made me think about two disparate things…
First, agency is also a cultural or systemic phenomenon, in which the environment (or soil) needs to be nurtured and fortified for agency to live and thrive among individuals and relationships within your culture.
Peter Fischbach and I will be bringing this notion into our advanced masterclass.
Second, if we replaced AI with Agile, Agile Ways of Working, or Agile Transformation in the article, I think everything would still hang together quite nicely. That is, it pointed out one of our primary mistakes in Organizational Agile Transformation. We never really created the agency space for the adoption to become anything more than an edict from above.
Now, I’m one of those optimists who think it’s still not too late for agile to reenergize leaders, leadership, and organizations so that they can effectively create this agency space for both agile and AI. In fact, I think the two are quite relational in that way.
The question is—
What specifically does that space look like? And how does an Agile Coach help to create it?
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob.
Related post - https://bobgalen.substack.com/p/agile-coaching-skills
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