Traction Heroes Ep. 40: Agency

We all work within intractably large and complex systems. How much agency do we really have? This was the question Harry and I explored on episode 40 of the Traction Heroes podcast. Harry read a passage from Eric Ries’s new book, Incorruptible (which I haven’t read.) It starts by citing John Steinbeck’s story of depression-era farmers dealing with bank officers who’ve been rendered impersonal as agents of a large organization. Organizations are a kind of being: Living things maintain boundaries between themselves and their environment, resources into energy. They grow, adapt, and reproduce. They exhibit behaviors that emerge from their parts but can’t be predicted by studying those parts in isolation. Most importantly, they display a will to survive that shapes every action they take. Organizations exhibit every one of these properties. The organization is a superorganism that demonstrates emergent properties. Among these, is a kind of intelligence. This is the entity the farmers were…