Agency, skill and mastery

Agency, skill, and mastery are topics on which I have so many thoughts, and I am still discovering myself. This writing summarizes my position as of roughly April 2024.

Agency, as pictured below, is to take on things, doing hard things without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming others or your circumstances.

Examples of low agency:
  1. I could develop so much faster if only the code was not so crappy! 
  2. We would be already finished if this or that team had done their job properly! 
  3. If only my boss (or company) understood me, I could really do great things for this Company or my team!
High agency behavior: 
  1. I'll try to make changes to the code/add tests/etc as I work on parts of it so that I will, over time, be faster.
  2. Let's see if there are ways that I/we could help that team complete/do their work in a way that we both benefit.
  3. I've observed my boss is good at X, but not so good at Y, so I'll try to adapt my behavior to minimize the Y and maximize the X so we can have an effective relationship.
Agency requires skills to be effective. That's why the drawing connects both. 
And maybe there's one more axis needed: judgement but then it gets too complicated for today so let's stay on just agency and skill.

People with high agency and high skills (top right) are the so-called game changers. They will have an impact well beyond their own area of responsibility, and, most importantly, will exert a long and profound effect on all areas which they can reach with their influence. 

People with high skill and low agency are still effective contributors to the organization objectives. 

People with low skills and high agency (bottom right) can move upward and become game changers. Importantly: skills can be taught and can be learned, while agency requires a special mindset which is more difficult, but not impossible! to achieve in the right conditions. 

When it comes to skills, I feel that the best motivation for skilling-up is mastery, that is the desire to master your craft. Another powerful motivation can be ego, but I find ego to be less reliable and more difficult to manage. Also, ego leaves us vulnerable to outside influence as the things on which we rely to motivate us can be taken away from us. 

Examples of ego motivation: 
  • recognition by others 
  • economic success 
  • competition 
  • spite-driven-development 
With mastery as a motivation the above become second-order effects. We are recognized because of our good work, as opposed to doing work to be recognized. Economic success is a result of our impact, not the driver.

Signs of an ego vs mastery approach can be recognized by how we react to failure or difficulties:

ego...
 
as a motivation

mastery...
 
as a motivation

How do we react to failure/difficulty?

embarrassment

curiosity

anger

acceptance

obsessing

judgement

It seems to me that mastery, as a motivation, is a much more kind master.

References

To write the above, I've mixed together content from the following source(s):