Life has been fair to me and granted me an experience across different industries and sectors. I had a moment in Eskom Uganda (Energy), Mukwano Group (Manufacturing), Monitor Publications (Media), BigEye (Digital), Independent Magazine (Media), Uganda Breweries Limited (Manufacturing) to mention but a few. Beyond strategy, if I learned one thing that makes the difference in organizations, it’s High Agency.
Unfortunately, like the skill of Strategy, high agency is hard to train. Organizations are often designed in a way to communicate that high agency is not a desirable skill. The hierarchical nature of most organizations immediately discourages high agency. Yet, those with high agency will also be oblivious to such structural discouragements. They will push through them; they will find a way around them until they land for their ideals.
But there are also leaders that are deliberate in stirring high agency, the kind of leaders that encourage their teams to take risks and fail big in pursuit of greatness. I remember Juliana Kagwa used to ask the marketing team; “what kind of mistake do you think you can make that UBL can’t recover from within a month?” She kept pestering us to put a cost to our highest mistake. A billion? It was not to deliberately tell people to move blindly and commit mistakes, but rather to take the leap of faith and pursue ideas worth pursuing, to bet on those high impact ideas.
It’s one idea I took seriously for the rest of my life. At the time, I had no name for it. I would later come to realize that this was the famous ‘High Agency.’ If you asked me what’s the one thing that differentiates people in life, High Agency will feature on that one thing. Of course, with it comes the skill of great judgement and great decision making.
Organizations in Uganda are grappling with a deficiency of high agency. You will see this when most decisions are deflected to the top. When those in the arena where the magic are happening look to those in the stands, and say, ‘please tell us what to do.’ High Agency compounds. And one must start on that journey.
For organizations, it starts with the kind of mistakes they punish. Some mistakes such as deliberate fraud should be punished. But if an employee failed genuinely while trying to find a way to make a business better, then such an employee shouldn’t be punished. For it sends a message that all form of high agency and creativity is to be punished. And nothing learns faster than a human being in an organization. Since humans optimize for survival, they will optimize for the skill that won’t get them punished.
Organizations must have ways of recognizing and rewarding high agency. Leaders and managers should also encourage their direct reports to become comfortable with decisiveness. Of course, there will be a moment when a direct report makes a wrong decision, but that’s how one learns to make decisions, by making some wrong ones. It’s an art that’s practiced. You must commit a lifetime to it.
Organizations that are optimized for High Agency tend to outperform the market. Africa Nxt Generation has covered this topic before and at Ortega Group we seek to advance it. If organizations in Uganda can do just one thing going forward, it’s to crack the puzzle of High Agency. It’s easier said than done!