Agency Is Not a Given

Rethinking Agency, Leadership and Human Behaviour in Complex Systems

We talk about agency as if it were a switch. Either you have it or you don’t. Either you take responsibility for your life or you are making excuses. Either you choose differently or you accept your circumstances.

In leadership, coaching, and organisational contexts, the phrase “people need to take ownership” is so common it has become almost invisible. It carries an implicit assumption that individuals can simply decide to act, and that action alone will produce change.

But lived experience tells a more complicated story.

People often know exactly what they “should” do and still cannot do it. They remain in jobs that are harming them, relationships that are draining them, systems that are misaligned with their values. Not because they are weak or unaware, but because agency does not operate in a vacuum. It operates inside context.

My own view of agency has been shaped by years of working with leaders, teams, and systems under pressure. It is less about heroic individual choice and more about the interplay between context, capacity, and consequence. Agency, in this sense, is neither total freedom nor helpless determinism. It is something more relational, negotiated, and situational.

Three lenses help me make sense of it.

The first is systems awareness. Nothing exists outside context. Every decision, behaviour, and possibility sits inside a web of structures, norms, incentives, expectations, and histories. Organisations, markets, governments, cultures, families, algorithms, and professional hierarchies all shape what is visible, acceptable, rewarded, or punished.

We do not step outside these systems to make choices. We make choices within them.

Consider something as simple as speaking up in a meeting. On paper, this looks like a personal decision. In reality, it is shaped by role seniority, gender dynamics, organisational culture, psychological safety, past experiences of being ignored or penalised, and perceived career risk. Two people in the same room are not facing the same decision.

When we ignore systems, we start to explain everything through individual character. Performance becomes a personality trait. Struggle becomes a personal failure. The environment disappears, even though it is doing most of the work.

The second lens is human realism. People have limits, not just choices.

Capacity is not infinite. Energy fluctuates. Cognitive load accumulates. Trauma leaves traces. Sleep deprivation changes judgement. Financial pressure narrows attention. Chronic stress reshapes behaviour. Even highly capable people can reach a point where the gap between knowing and doing becomes enormous.

From the outside, this can look like inertia or avoidance. From the inside, it often feels like depletion.

You can see this in quieter ways as well. Someone recognises a role is no longer right for them, but cannot yet move. A leader asks for ownership, but the team continues to hesitate. Not because the intent is missing, but because the conditions required to act are not fully in place.

Human beings are not purely rational actors optimising for long-term outcomes. We are biological organisms managing competing demands with finite resources. The ability to act depends not only on what options exist, but on whether we have the bandwidth to pursue them.

This is why advice that focuses only on mindset or motivation can feel strangely hollow. It assumes belief is the missing ingredient, when often the limiting factor is capacity.

The third lens is responsibility without absolutism. Action still matters, but it is not absolute.

Rejecting simplistic agency does not mean embracing passivity. People are not powerless. They can influence their circumstances, set boundaries, withdraw consent, seek allies, change environments, or experiment with new behaviours. Small moves can shift trajectories over time.

What changes is the expectation that individuals alone can control outcomes.

You can choose to leave a job, but you cannot choose how the market will respond. You can have a difficult conversation, but you cannot determine how the other person will hear it. You can take a step, but you cannot dictate the terrain.

This perspective places responsibility on participation rather than control. You are accountable for what you bring into a situation, not for mastering the entire system.

Seen together, these three lenses produce a different understanding of agency. It is not independence. It is influence exercised from within constraint.

Agency emerges where systems, relationships, and personal capacity intersect. It expands when conditions become supportive and contracts when they become hostile. It is shaped by power, negotiated through interaction, and expressed through behaviour, not intention alone.

This also explains why people can feel simultaneously responsible and stuck. They are neither fully free nor fully determined. They are navigating a landscape where some doors are open, some are closed, and many require more energy than they currently have.

One of the risks of oversimplifying agency is that it pushes systemic problems onto individuals. Burnout becomes a resilience issue rather than a workload issue. Disengagement becomes a motivation problem rather than a meaning problem. Silence becomes a confidence deficit rather than a safety calculation.

When we frame everything as a matter of personal choice, we unintentionally obscure the conditions that shape those choices.

The opposite risk, of course, is fatalism. If everything is structural, nothing is actionable. People disengage from the possibility of change altogether. This is equally unhelpful.

The middle ground is more accurate and more useful. It recognises that individuals can act, but not in isolation from their environment. It recognises that systems matter, but are not omnipotent. It recognises that responsibility exists, but is distributed.

In practical terms, this shifts the question from “Why don’t people just…” to “What conditions make action possible here?” It moves attention from character judgements to contextual understanding.

It also reframes leadership. The role of a leader is not simply to demand ownership, but to shape the environment in which ownership can realistically occur. Psychological safety, clarity, manageable workloads, trust, and fair incentives are not soft extras. They are preconditions for agency.

On a personal level, this perspective can be strangely relieving. It allows people to acknowledge constraints without surrendering their capacity to influence. It invites compassion without excusing harmful behaviour. It replaces the binary of control versus helplessness with something more honest.

You do not have to carry the weight of every outcome, but you are not irrelevant to them either.

Agency, then, is not a possession. It is a relationship between a person and their context. It lives in the space between what is possible, what is permitted, what is safe, and what is sustainable.

And perhaps most importantly, it is not just something individuals have. It is something environments produce.

In that sense, agency is both a condition and an outcome. It is shaped by the systems people are operating within, and in turn shapes what they are able to do inside them.

Most organisations say they want ownership. Few are willing to examine the conditions that make ownership possible.

Until that shifts, the conversation about agency will continue to place responsibility in the wrong place, and miss the opportunity to design environments where people can actually act.

That is a harder conversation. It requires us to design for agency, not just demand it.

If this resonates and you'd like to explore what it means for you or your organisation, reach out via info@dialecticalconsulting.com.au or contact me via linkedIn.