High Agency Is a Strategic Asset

High agency gives founders and organizations a massive advantage to accelerate execution and drive results. This article explores why high agency is a critical strategic asset for founders and leaders, how it impacts organizational performance and practical steps to cultivate it at scale. Whether you are a founder, executive, or team leader, understanding and fostering high agency can be the difference between thriving and stagnating as your organization grows.

"High agency is often the key differentiator that enables organizations to maintain momentum, adapt quickly, and achieve ambitious goals."

By the end of this article, you’ll understand what high agency is, why it matters more than ever, and how to build it into your team’s DNA.

What Is High Agency?

High agency refers to the ability to take control of situations and produce desired outcomes. It can also be described as empowerment, self-efficacy, autonomy, or proactivity. High agency is not merely an inborn trait; it's a mindset that can be honed, developed and perfected. It is a muscle that can be trained, individually and organizationally.

Why Is High Agency a Strategic Asset?

• High agency is critical because it often outweighs talent or intelligence alone in determining success.
• In competitive or complex environments, high agency is often more valuable than raw intelligence or skill, as it ensures execution.
• A high agency person is a valuable asset in any organization because they step up to solve problems without waiting for permission.

The Quiet Constraint Founders Misdiagnose

The Real Reason Momentum Stalls

You don’t lose momentum because your team isn’t smart enough.

You lose it because no one feels authorized to move.



Imagine you are a founder facing a stalled decision that has lingered on your agenda for weeks, delaying a critical product launch. This inertia is common in many organizations: decisions slow, initiatives stall, meetings increase and just like that, the founder becomes the bottleneck.

Personal anecdote: One of my mentors was the COO of a publicly traded company. He asked me a simple question: "How do you know if you are winning?". I don't remember the answer I gave him but I do remember what he said: "You are winning when you go on vacation and the work continues to get done. You win when you walk the halls and the team is high fiving one another." This is high agency before the concept of high agency became popularized.

Why Typical Solutions Fail

The typical response, hiring smarter people, adding processes, or tightening alignment, often exacerbates the problem.

• In the early stages, intelligence accelerates progress.
• At scale, it can slow execution.

What restores momentum isn’t brilliance. It’s agency. Developing a high agency culture, coaching high agency behaviour, empowering personal agency, and cultivating high agency thinking are entirely possible with intentional focus.

High agency is the capacity to make decisions and own outcomes without needing explicit directions. High agency is not a personality trait or a cultural slogan; it is a strategic asset that enables execution amid complexity.

Most founders don’t realize this until they’re already paying the price.

High agency is a survival strategy that separates those who thrive from those who merely endure. Because it challenges established norms, high agency is rare and valuable in organizations that encourage compliance.

To understand how this plays out as companies grow, let's examine the patterns that emerge at scale.

What High Agency Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Defining High Agency

High agency manifests as the ability to take control of situations and produce desired outcomes. It can also be described as empowerment, self-efficacy, autonomy, or proactivity. High agency is not merely an inborn trait; it's a mindset that can be honed and developed.



Misconceptions About High Agency

High agency is widely misunderstood. It is not:

• Confidence
• Assertiveness
• Hustle
• Loud leadership

High agency is quieter and more consequential. It is the willingness to take responsibility in the absence of certainty.

Identifying High Agency

To identify high agency in individuals, especially those who may not be overtly expressive, consider how they act in uncertain situations or when they are not closely supervised. A diagnostic checklist can help:

• Do they handle outcomes independently?
• Are they proactive in addressing issues?
• Do they come to you with problems or solutions?

These questions help identify agency beyond extroversion or charisma. Recognizing agency in quieter roles, such as engineering, is as important as in more vocal positions. The costs of waiting—such as lost revenue and delayed product-market fit—are significant. Highlighting these tangible financial impacts can motivate faster action.

High vs. Low Agency Behaviours

A high-agency person:

• Acts without waiting for perfect clarity
• Makes trade-offs explicit
• Owns outcomes, not just inputs
• Moves forward even when consensus is incomplete

High agency refers to the experiences we have when we set goals and take action to achieve them, giving us a sense of control over our lives. High-agency individuals are usually self-directed, resourceful, and resilient when faced with challenges.

A low-agency person may be brilliant, thoughtful and articulate but defaults to waiting.

The difference isn’t capability. It’s posture.

With this foundation, let’s look at how high and low agency manifest as organizations scale.

The Pattern You Start Seeing at Scale

The Strong Team, Brittle Execution Paradox

Across Seed to Series C companies, the pattern is remarkably consistent.

The team looks strong on paper:

• Impressive resumes
• Sharp thinkers
• Well-articulated opinions



Yet execution feels inexplicably brittle.

Where Execution Breaks Down

Projects stall between meetings. Ownership blurs at handoffs. Teams that do only what is required often wait for direction, while high-agency individuals proactively solve problems. As a result, everyone may be “aligned,” but progress stalls.

The organization isn’t incompetent. It’s permission-starved.

The Three Rising Forces

As companies grow, three things rise simultaneously:

• Ambiguity
• Coordination cost
• Risk aversion

If agency does not increase faster than ambiguity, coordination cost, and risk aversion, execution will stall. For example, a 20% increase in headcount can raise decision latency by 30%. Even a modest increase in agency is essential to offset these forces and prevent inefficiency from undermining progress.

Founders often misread this as a talent problem.

It’s not.

It’s a design problem.

Understanding these patterns lays the groundwork for why a high-agency mindset is essential. Not just a growth mindset.

Why Growth Mindset Isn’t Enough: The Need for a High Agency Mindset

Growth Mindset vs. Agency

Growth mindset is useful. It just isn’t sufficient.



Growth mindset emphasizes:

• Learning from failure
• Personal development
• Skill acquisition

Agency emphasizes:

• Ownership under ambiguity
• Decision-making without permission
• Accountability for outcomes

Where They Overlap and Diverge

Where they overlap:

• Both tolerate imperfection
• Both value learning

Where they diverge:

• Growth mindset can stay internal
• Agency must externalize into action

You can have a team that is constantly learning and is still paralyzed.

At scale, learning without movement is indistinguishable from stagnation.

High-agency individuals believe their actions matter and that they can influence outcomes. This conviction, that actions matter, is central to turning learning into real-world results.

With this distinction in mind, let’s explore how agency directly impacts execution velocity.

The Core Insight: Agency Is Execution Velocity

Once companies reach a certain size, intelligence is no longer the bottleneck. Execution velocity becomes the constraint. Velocity is not about moving fast indiscriminately. It’s about maintaining forward motion despite friction. And friction always increases with scale.



For example, a startup we are working with recently faced a 48-hour deadline to pivot its marketing strategy after seeing poor results. The team quickly gathered data, ran rapid tests and implemented a new approach within two days. This decisive action kept the project on track and improved market positioning, exemplifying execution velocity.

High agency is how velocity survives: incomplete data, cross-functional tension, capital at risk, Board oversight. High agency acts as a force multiplier for execution velocity, amplifying an organization's ability to overcome obstacles and sustain momentum. Without agency, organizations slow down not because they lack ideas but because responsibility diffuses.

To see how friction and agency interact, let’s look at the agency–friction curve.

The Agency-Friction Curve

Sources of Friction

As companies scale, friction rises predictably.

At this point, companies diverge.



Low-Agency vs. High-Agency Organizations

High agency does not eliminate friction; it finds ways to navigate it. High-agency individuals are often the go-to problem solvers, proactively addressing issues before they escalate.



That routing is the competitive advantage. A high agency person understands the difference between being right and being effective. They find ways. They take initiative. They make things happen. They own their career success. They don't blame external factors. They discover what the secret sauce is for getting shit done. Hence why they so often make for successful entrepreneurs. Whereas low-agency people focus on being right, rarely challenge the status quo, and often blame circumstances.

Now, let’s discuss how to build agency muscle within your organization.

Building Agency Muscle

Building agency muscle is not about waiting for permission or ideal conditions. It requires developing a high-agency mindset that empowers decisive action, even amid uncertainty.



Steps to Practice High Agency Daily

• Step 1: Set a specific goal every morning and take one proactive step towards achieving it by noon, such as drafting a version one report or proposal.
• Step 2: Engage in a brief reflection at the end of each day to identify one decision made independently and one potential improvement in decision-making.
• Step 3: Allocate a fixed time on your calendar each day to tackle a small but challenging task independently, ensuring continuous problem-solving practice without guidance.

Implementing these micro-behaviours can more effectively ignite cultural change than broad exhortations.

High-agency individuals shape outcomes rather than simply react to circumstances. They solve problems, overcome obstacles, and pursue goals with initiative and self-efficacy. This agency is built through deliberate practice: setting goals, taking initiative, and learning from both successes and setbacks.

But agency doesn’t just affect execution speed—it reshapes the entire system.

The Second-Order Effects Founders Underestimate

Agency doesn’t just affect execution speed.



It reshapes the entire system. High-agency individuals are the ones who step forward to drive change and shape outcomes, recognizing opportunities and confidently acting to create new possibilities.

Capital Efficiency

High-agency teams:

• Kill weak initiatives earlier
• Avoid zombie projects
• Spend with intent, not hope
• Take calculated risks to maximize capital efficiency

Low-agency teams burn capital quietly, slowly, and defensively.

Investor Confidence

Investors don’t trust plans. They trust momentum.

A strong track record of initiative and follow-through builds investor confidence, as it demonstrates the ability to deliver results beyond just having a good plan.

High-agency organizations:

• Demonstrate follow-through
• Reduce Board micromanagement
• Increase strategic optionality

Low-agency teams invite oversight by default.

Talent Density

High-agency people seek peers. High-agency cultures attract high agency talent—individuals who demonstrate initiative, ownership, and proactive problem-solving—creating a dense environment of innovation and progress.

They avoid bureaucratic gravity wells.

Low-agency cultures repel operators and attract career managers.

Founder Leverage

Perhaps the most overlooked effect.

In high-agency systems:

• The founder stops being the router
• Strategic thinking time reappears
• Leadership shifts from execution to architecture, focusing on building teams of high-agency individuals to maximize founder leverage and organizational performance.

In low-agency systems, the founder becomes the bottleneck—and eventually the constraint.

To understand why even smart teams can stall, let’s examine the intelligence trap.

The Intelligence Trap

Some of the most stalled organizations are staffed with extremely smart people.

This is not accidental.



Smart people are often trained, implicitly or explicitly, to:

• Avoid visible mistakes
• Reduce career risk
• Seek consensus
• Optimize correctness over progress

This produces a dangerous archetype: the frustrated genius.

Common Signals of the Frustrated Genius

• Sophisticated analysis with no owner
• Endless scenario planning
• Reluctance to ship imperfect work
• Escalation disguised as prudence

Those in this archetype do only what is required, avoiding extra responsibility. In contrast, high-agency individuals take ownership of outcomes beyond their formal responsibilities, driving progress.

Intelligence without agency defaults to safety.

Safety feels responsible. It is often the most expensive choice available.

Let’s look closer at the potential of frustrated geniuses and how to unlock it.

Frustrated Geniuses and Their Potential

Some of the most brilliant minds in any organization are also the most stuck. These frustrated geniuses have high talent but low agency. They generate brilliant ideas, see possibilities others miss, and possess a remarkable ability to analyze complex problems. Yet, without a proactive mindset, their impact is limited.



Frustrated geniuses often fall into analysis paralysis, overthinking and waiting for perfect conditions before acting. Fear of failure and lack of confidence in influencing outcomes can keep them on the sidelines.

Founders play a key role in either suppressing or unlocking agency. Here’s how they can avoid killing it.

How Founders Accidentally Kill Agency

Most founders do not intentionally suppress agency, but do so through structural behaviours such as over-reviewing delegated decisions and reversing calls late in the process. These actions, often seen in weekly reviews or strategy meetings, inhibit decision-making. Founders should recognize these patterns and instead encourage team members to outline their decision-making processes, fostering a culture of accountability

Rewarding alignment over ownership and punishing visible failure more than silent delay also discourages initiative, often in performance reviews or status meetings. Structuring these meetings to emphasize ownership and allow learning from mistakes can foster agency. Mapping these agency barriers to specific events and addressing them helps promote high-agency behaviours.

“Don’t move until it’s safe.”

In low-agency environments, people start blaming circumstances instead of taking responsibility for outcomes.1

Agency doesn’t die from lack of encouragement. It dies from a lack of credible autonomy.

If people wait for you, it’s because you trained them to.

So how do you operationalize high agency without resorting to empty slogans?

Operationalizing High Agency

This is not about posters or value decks.



It is about organizational design. Developing high agency means cultivating a mindset where individuals proactively seek solutions, take ownership, and view challenges as opportunities for growth.

Hiring for Agency

Prioritize evidence of:

• End-to-end ownership
• Judgment under ambiguity
• Decisions made without permission
• Prioritize hiring individuals with high initiative, a proactive mindset, and strong self-direction.

Organizations that promote autonomy see 50% higher employee participation and 20% better business results.

Downweight:

• Pure technical virtuosity
• Over-polished narratives
• Role-bounded thinking

Teaching Initiative and High Agency

High agency is not just innate; it can be taught and developed. In today’s environment, teaching initiative and high agency are transformative for individuals and organizations.

Project-based learning is effective for building agency. Giving people ownership of real-world problems and the freedom to develop solutions encourages initiative. Environments should expect ownership, decision-making, and learning from mistakes.

Project-based learning is a powerful tool. By giving people ownership of real-world problems and the freedom to develop innovative solutions, you encourage them to take initiative and act with a strong sense of agency. The key is to create environments where taking ownership, making decisions, and learning from mistakes are not just allowed but expected.

Decision Architecture

• Define who decides—not who contributes. Agency flourishes where responsibility is explicit. In decision architecture, cultivating an ownership mindset is crucial, as it encourages individuals to take personal responsibility for outcomes and proactively drive decisions forward. When it’s clear who is accountable for a decision, people are empowered to act decisively and learn from the results.
• Bias toward reversible decisions
• Penalize delay more than mistakes

Incentives

• Reward outcomes, not effort
• Promote people who move the system
• Make ownership visible and costly
• Recognize and reward individuals who take ownership and drive outcomes

But how do you measure agency and ensure it’s being built?

Measuring Agency Is Crucial

Agency is observable.



Signals to Track

• Initiatives launched without prompting
• Problems solved without escalation
• Decisions made with incomplete data
• Follow-through under pressure

To objectively assess agency, using both lagging and leading metrics can provide a fuller picture.

• Lagging metric: Cycle time (time from decision to execution)
• Leading behaviour: Unprompted initiatives per quarter

These metrics help ensure that agency is measured accurately and effectively, encouraging disciplined experimentation without being gamed.

In interviews, questions focus on revealing high agency traits by using behavioural and hypothetical scenarios to assess how candidates handle ambiguity, make decisions, and take ownership. Look for:

• Stories of ambiguity, not just success
• Ownership beyond job description
• Evidence of consequence acceptance

High-agency individuals are 30% more likely to experience job satisfaction and 25% more likely to advance their careers.

Agency shows up in behaviour, not self-description.

Once you have high-agency people, retaining them is the next challenge.

Retaining High-Agency People Without Burning Them Out

High-agency people burn out faster in low-agency systems.



The fix isn’t control. It’s alignment.

What High-Agency People Need

• Clear impact
• Resource flexibility
• Trust with boundaries

High-agency people do not need constant direction; they thrive when given autonomy and the freedom to operate independently.

What Exhausts High-Agency People

• Constant justification
• Approval theater
• Responsibility without authority

High-agency individuals are characterized by their ability to navigate obstacles with ease, while low-agency individuals often get stuck at the first sign of resistance.

Burnout is often a signal, not of workload, but of misaligned agency.

Looking ahead, AI will only make high agency more valuable.

The AI Angle: Why Agency Will Matter More, Not Less

AI is collapsing execution costs.

• Planning advantage is shrinking.
• Speed advantage is growing.



In this environment:

• Analysis is cheap
• Iteration is fast
• Judgment is scarce

The highest-leverage leaders won’t be:

• The smartest
• The most technical
• The best prompt engineers

While technical skills can increasingly be outsourced to AI, it is high agency (i.e. initiative, adaptability, and proactive leadership) that sets valuable professionals apart in this new landscape.

They’ll be the ones who:

• Decide early
• Act decisively
• Correct aggressively

In 2026, high agency will involve using AI as a capability builder to enhance human judgment and creative problem-solving.

Agency becomes the scarce input.

So, what’s the founder’s reality check?

The Founder Reality Check

Most companies don’t fail from a lack of insight.



They fail from hesitation disguised as intelligence.

If execution feels heavy, slow, or brittle, ask:

• Who truly owns decisions? A high-agency person believes they are the driver of their own destiny, not just a passenger along for the ride.
• Where does responsibility diffuse?
• What risk is being silently avoided?

High agency is not a cultural aspiration.

It is a strategic choice.

One that shows up in:

• Who decides
• Who owns
• Who moves without permission

Personal agency is crucial—high-agency individuals possess a remarkable ability to take control of situations and achieve desired outcomes, whereas low-agency individuals often feel at the mercy of circumstances.

These are the conversations founders usually have too late.

And this is the kind of decision work I do with leaders navigating real inflection points.

Need help?

This article aims to clarify one thing: how decisions are actually made when complexity, capital, and consequence collide.



This is the work I focus on—helping founders and leadership teams increase execution velocity without burning trust, talent, or strategic optionality.

If you’re at a point where the next decision matters more than the next idea, this will likely resonate.

On this site, the focus is on the driver and the pit crew: how leaders think, decide and operate under pressure.

At my firm, Future Ventures, the focus is on the racecar: building the chassis, the power unit, and the systems that enable a company to perform at speed as it scales.

Both matter.

They just do different work.