Agency June 24, 2026

You are the one who decides what you do. Always. Some people don't believe this. But it's true, in martial arts and software development. And everywhere else, too.

In martial arts training, this is a hurdle you must overcome to be able to achieve anything. Beginners will often train slowly and with little force (which is totally OK since it prevents injuries). Once they have the movements down pat, they need to increase the energy they put into their movements to progress. Say they are training how to avoid a punch to the head by stepping aside and protecting their head with their arm. They practice by having their partner take a step forward from a relatively large distance (so they can see the punch coming) and performing the defensive movement when the partner's fist comes forward – hesitantly, because the partner is a beginner, too, and doesn't want to hurt anyone. They train like this for a while and everything goes well. Then they change partners.

Their new partner has a bit more practice and there is no hesitation in their attack. It isn't really faster, but more determined. And what does the defender do? They freeze. There is no physical reason for this. The attack has not changed. It has not become much faster. The distance is still large enough to see the attack coming and there is plenty of time to step aside. The attacker is not cheating somehow. And still the defender freezes. Because something has changed. But it's nothing physical. It's the attitude of the attacker. And that was enough for the defender to lose their cool. To lose their agency.

You could also say the attacker robbed the defender of their agency. But they can't really do that. The only thing they can do is try to trick the defender into forgetting that they have it. If the defender doesn't forget, they just step aside. So an important part of the training is not to forget that you have agency, even under adversarial conditions.

I have seen the same thing at work. Not punches to the head, but forgetting about agency. I have worked with people who were complaining about outdated documentation. Did they update it? No, they said they would like to but they didn't have time. When this came up in a conversation with their boss, the boss told them to take the time; told them it was totally OK, up-to-date documentation was important, and they could prioritize it. After this, they were still reluctant, saying they didn't feel they could take the time. These were not even adversarial conditions. These were the best conditions they could have had. And they still felt they couldn't do what they wanted to do. They forgot they had agency. I don't know if they ever remembered; I don't have contact with them anymore. I hope so for their sake.

When I was the lead in another development team, the team identified the need to refactor part of the codebase in preparation for an upcoming change. It wasn't a trivial thing, but it was by no means a major undertaking. One or two hours of work maybe, including tests and reviews and so on. When I said, “OK, let's do it then,” two of my teammates wanted to write a ticket and discuss it with the product owner first. They were worried whether they would be allowed to do it. I knew the product owner well. He had never before quibbled with technical decisions; he trusted the judgment of the dev team in such matters (which is as it should be). So again, we had optimal conditions, and my teammates were still worried whether they could dare to do their job. Whether they were allowed to apply the expertise for which they had been hired. They had mislaid their agency in a cupboard somewhere and needed to be reminded of it. After a bit of discussion, during which I tried to free their minds (like Morpheus, but with less action), we did the refactoring, it was a success, nobody got told off because of it (and why would they?), and I'm proud to say I left the team with a greater awareness of their own agency.

Sean Goedecke touches on this topic in his post Doing nothing at work:

One thing I recommend for engineers new to on-call is to avoid rushing: take a few breaths before joining the call or before speaking, and in general try to “think in slow motion”. Most incidents resolve on their own. Most frantic “maybe this will help” changes during incidents make things worse, not better. As a general rule, if you can simply avoid panicking, you will be doing better than most engineers at incident response.

You don't need to be driven by events. You do have the agency to do the job you were hired to do, and that, for most knowledge workers, is to think. And this implies taking the time to think.

Like for the martial artist, remembering you have agency is most difficult – and at the same time most important – when the pressure is on.

I experienced this once in a project that was supposed to integrate services from different business departments. Some of these business departments were not exactly on speaking terms, so the project was politically charged. As the one responsible for the architecture I had to make some decisions regarding the technical details of the integration. Because in this situation even small details could blow up politically, at times I felt unable to make real progress. When I had to discuss one particular contentious aspect with the architect in charge of one of the services, I was apprehensive because I was sure of meeting resistance. But I told myself all they could say was “no” and that I would be able to deal with it. I had all the right arguments and some options in my pocket. So I went over to their office, and in fact, they did say “no”. At first. And then something amazing happened. I watched them talk themselves around to my point of view. I didn't even have to do much. The biggest problem had not been actual resistance, but me projecting my own uncertainty onto the situation. Once I had overcome that, it was fine.

Fortunately, this is something you can practice. Martial artists do this by repetition and incremental increase of energy. Practicing the same situations repeatedly is more of a challenge in software development.^[1] Asking your colleagues, “Can we do this meeting again, pretending it hasn't already happened, so I can work on my agency,” is, let's say, not the accepted practice. There are some things you can do, however:

• Recycle past situations (as in Feel the force, but with different focus questions). Pick a situation where you felt powerless, “robbed” of your agency, and reflect on it. Ask yourself why you felt this way. What real evidence was there that doing what you wanted to do would have been impossible? Or at least would have had overwhelmingly negative consequences? On what basis did you anticipate resistance? What different paths could you have taken and what could have been the positive consequences?
• Start small. If you feel uncomfortable exercising your agency, don't start with the big challenge! Like the martial artist who shouldn't try to catch a bullet with their teeth on their first day, try it in a low-stakes situation. Rename that badly named variable that's been bugging you! Observe what happens. On success, move on to bigger things.
• Radiate intent. Instead of asking for permission before doing something, tell people you are going to do it, loudly, and then do it. If it's really a problem, people will probably tell you, and afterwards, nobody can say they didn't know. Elizabeth Ayer calls this “radiating intent”. She describes the approach in more detail here.
• Take a breath. When you are in a situation where you feel that you don't have agency, take a deep breath before despairing. The famous psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In other words, agency. Taking a breath or two can be enough to find that space and regain your agency.

As you practice exercising your agency, you will hit limits. Some things are simply physically impossible. I cannot sprout wings and fly. This is a pity, but this does not mean I don't have agency. Me having agency doesn't imply that I'll always get what I want, only that I am the one who decides what I am going to do about it. And that is no small thing.

So remember: You are the one who decides what you do. Always.