Agency, responsibility, and control, and the relationships between them

The past three posts are linked here; read them if you haven’t already, then read on about how they combine together to make a person more effective, useful, and influential.

• Agency: The “main character” trait – It’s popular to describe high agency as “Main Character Energy,” referring to the fact that the main character in a story is the person who does interesting things and has unusual experiences. The modern world includes so many opportunities to do interesting things, but also presents us with more tempting lifestyle scripts that keep us stagnant.

• Responsibility: The trait of honorable obligation – The second key trait is responsibility. Responsibility is a moral reality, unlike agency, but it often increases agency in a person’s life – sometimes tremendously. People tend to work harder and more tenaciously when they have someone or something to take care of.

• Control: The mysterious aura of good outcomes – Some people often fail to show up or follow through on plans, not because they lack ability or care, but because “unexpected” life interruptions seem to follow them around. What’s going on there? What is actually within your control?

The relationships between them

When thinking about these three traits in combination, I notice first of all that agency and control seem to be inversely related. Being high in one means you’re more likely to be low in the other. A high-control person is likely to be detail-oriented and risk averse, committing to only what’s “possible/reasonable” within their realm of experience. The high-agency person thinks big-picture and accepts big risks—some unforeseen, probably—to set their plans in motion. You can see then how the high-control person would miss unusual opportunities, and the high-agency person would stumble into unforeseen disruptions that kill their plans.

A friend of mine shared in an Instagram story, “Finally headed to Europe after two missed flights and losing my passport. Send me your summer travel plans!” Traveling to Europe alone as a young woman is a pretty high-agency move. Missing two flights and losing your passport is a very low-control outcome. That pattern is not hard to find.

What, then? Do we choose one or the other? Of course not, this is True Generalist! We simply get very good at both. A person who is both ambitious in goal-setting and consistent in execution is a master of doing things, and we aspire to that.

The second thing I notice is that responsibility can boost both agency and control. I previously wrote:

If everything is chaos at work but you feel responsible for this product shipping on time, you’ll figure out a way to get it done. If your family is hungry, you’ll figure out a way to get money. High-agency actions can be powered by a sense of responsibility…

But responsibility also increases control, if that’s what’s needed! Speaking of losing passports, there was a meme a while back about young adults traveling together and appointing the “airport dad” of the group to handle all the logistics, making sure the plans go smoothly. The subtext of course is that dads are high-control. You’ll find abundant examples in moms too. A person who bears responsibility for others assumes all the control-risk for them, and in doing so he/she becomes better at generally keeping outcomes under control.

We arrive at neat kind of paradox. Agency and control straightforwardly empower you to do things; it’s clear how they each work. But they tend to oppose each other, and it’s easy to get fixated on one while suffering from neglecting the other. Then we have responsibility, which on its face looks like the opposite of “doing things”—a set of extra obligations you have to meet before you can do “what you really want.” But responsibility is a lever that increases both agency and control! Is the moral weight of responsibility necessary to turn you into an ideal, highly capable doing machine? I’m not sure, but we can’t ignore that it does seem to do that.