Notes / Learning & leadership
The flow of agency.
Translated by AI from the Swedish passages. Existing English is preserved.
My team and I have been philosophising again. Perhaps we’re pushing it a little. But surely it’s a hypothesis worth developing? (And someone will of course object that this is what leadership has always been about, but in practice “management” in organisations most certainly has NOT done this.) ...
Old manager: assign work → coordinate people → review deliverables → decide
Human-agent leader: define outcome → design roles and authority → orchestrate capacity → observe evidence → intervene in exceptions → improve the system
The key conceptual shift is subtle but important: the thing being managed is no longer primarily people or agents. It is the flow of agency through the organization.
That makes leadership less about controlling execution and more about designing the conditions under which execution can safely happen without you.