(2022-07-05) Critchlow Some Notes On Agency At Work

Tom Critchlow: Some Notes on Agency at Work. I’ve been trying to make sense of my work recently.

maybe the common throughline is increasing agency.

Specifically - the idea of increasing agency for people’s work (DayJob) selves. This feels promising as a potential north star because it neatly aligns with the big things I’m spending my time on:

Consulting work: My consulting work these days is mostly about two things - it’s about bringing strategic clarity to executives and helping organizations build new capabilities

SEO MBA teaching: The courses I’ve built (especially the course on Executive Presence) help people increase their personal agency. It’s not really about teaching skills as much as it’s providing new vantage points and new ways of conducting yourself so that you can take on more senior work

Indie consulting book: The core thesis for the book is how to build a sustainable independent consulting practice

One of the first distinctions to tease apart is the difference between fulfilling work and high-agency work

From David MacIver with some great notes on fulfilling work: And there are aspects of employment I miss a great deal, even if there are other aspects that I do not miss at all.

David goes on to suggest that work almost never meets these criteria, and that’s partly why chasing “fulfilling work” might be the wrong objective. Work with purpose and meaning sounds nice but might be impossible to reach? It’s not quite what I’m getting at with increasing agency.

High-agency work is almost independent of work with purpose and meaning. Except my hunch is that these two concepts are actually deeply intertwined…

I sketched out this 2x2 for the kinds of “joy of work”

High Skills / Inner World: This is the kind of raw skills of personal productivity.

High Skills / Outer World: This is your ability to create systems of influence. To be able to improve the systems and processes around you.

High Meaning / Inner World: This is the idea of doing day to day work that is stimulating. Are the tasks in front of you energizing?

High Meaning / Outer World: This is the big idea of “work with purpose” - fulfilling work that has meaning in the world around you.

When you put together a course, you’re supposed to focus on the personal transformation, not the skills. Complete the phrase “After taking this course you will ___”. The more aspirational you can make this the better your course will sell I think.

But this brings up a subtle point: what are the boundaries of who you believe you can become? How much personal transformation is possible? (hero's journey)

As I begin to explore the research literature around this concept of agency I see there’s a term “bounded agency” which investigates personal agency as a complex interwoven set of dependencies

And, surely, our sense of agency changes over time through our careers.

Finally, agency is about doing things (To-Be Or To-Do). Applies equally well to kids and grown ups: The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way around.