So maybe Claude can talk about some of this to Gartner, Salesforce, and all the other big Agentic AI arms dealers.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man’s free agency is a God-given gift.—David O. McKay
The Argument
Agency is personal. It is the source of confidence behind all intention. By its nature the networked marketplace welcomes full agency for customers. So, because the best vendors are customer driven, there will be many more ways for both vendors and customers to thrive in the networked marketplace, and therefore also in the Intention Economy.
Originalities
When we use the word “agency” these days, we usually mean a party that acts on behalf of another one—such as an advertising, PR, real estate, talent or literary agency. But the deeper original meanings of agency are about acting for ones’ self. Here are the Oxford English Dictionary’s relevant definitions of agent:
- a. One who (or that which) acts or exerts power, as distinguished from the patient, and also from the instrument.
- He who operates in a particular direction, who produces an effect. Of things: The efficient cause.
- a. Of persons: One who does the actual work of anything, as distinguished from the instigator or employer; hence, one who acts for another, a deputy, steward, factor, substitute, representative, or emissary. (In this sense the word has numerous specific applications in Commerce, Politics, Law, etc., flowing directly from the general meaning.)
Here are the OED’s first three definitions of agency:
- The faculty of an agent or of acting; active working or operation; action, activity.
- Working as a means to an end; instrumentality, intermediation.
- Action or instrumentality embodied or personified as concrete existence.[ii]
In the Intention Economy, liberated customers enjoy full agency for themselves, and employ agents who respect and apply the powers that customers grant them.
Work
Business in the industrial world is complicated. Nobody can do everything, and that’s one reason markets work. Opportunity appears where something can be done that others are not doing, or are not doing well enough. Many of those opportunities are representational in the sense that agency, in the form of work, is handed off. We hire agents to work as extensions of ourselves.
But agency is personal in the first place. Having agency makes us effective in the world, which includes the marketplace. This raises some interesting questions. What does it mean for a customer to have full agency in the marketplace? Is it just to show up with sufficient cash and credit? Is it enough to be known as a good customer only within the scope of a company’s CRM system? That’s the current default assumption, and it’s woefully limiting.
Take for example my agency as a customer in the airline business. Most years I fly more than a hundred thousand miles. I bring to the market a portfolio of knowledge, expertise and intent (that is, agency) that should be valuable to myself and valuable to the companies I might deal with. I know a lot about the science and history of aviation, about many airlines old and new, about many airports and their cities, about geography, geology, weather, astronomy and other relevant sciences. I’m a photographer whose work is known within some aviation circles and to a small degree adds value to flying in general. I am also a fairly easy passenger to please. I require no assistance, have no dietary restrictions, show up early and don’t trouble airline personnel with rookie questions. I prefer certain seats but don’t freak out if I don’t get them, and I’m often one of the first to trade seats if it helps keep a couple or a family sit together on a plane. I am also willing to pay for certain privileges. Yet only the first item—miles flown—is of serious interest to the airline I usually fly, which is United. That I’m a million-mile flyer with United is unknown and uninteresting to all but that one airline.
Thus I have a measure of agency only within United’s system, and somewhat less than that with other members of the Star Alliance, to which United belongs. My self-actualization as a passenger is not my own, but that of a “1K” (100k mile/year) or whatever it says on my United Mileage Plus membership card in a given year. I am a high-value calf in their well-tended corrall. Its nice that my one-company status gets me some privileges with other airlines in the Star Alliance. But, since the IT systems of Star Alliance member airlines are not entirely communicative, those privileges are spotty. Asking any Star Alliance airline to be a cow for the calves of other airlines makes each of them groan.
The other airlines don’t know what they’re missing because they can’t know what they’re missing. All their heuristics are confined to their own CRM systems, plus whatever speculative “personalized” jive they buy from data mills. None of that milled data comes directly from you or me. If Delta buys data about me from, say, Acxiom, my agency is nowhere to be found. All the agency is Acxiom’s, and they’re not even acting as an agency for me in the representational sense of the word. I’ve offloaded no work on them at all, but they’re doing it on my behalf, sort of.
We can only do better if agency is ours and not theirs.
Self-actualization
To consider what self-actualization means in the marketplace, it helps to examine the business sections of bookstores and libraries. They are full of books about self-actualization for companies and their employees; but there are few if any books for customers in the business section. There is nothing, yet, about what it means for you and me to be self-actualized as customers. If there were, what would they say?
In A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow placed “The need for self-actualization” at the top of the list of human motivations—above survival, safety, love and esteem. [v]
Being customers is part-time work for most of us. (Even for shopping addicts.) Yet we bring more to market than fits into the scope of any seller’s current systems for ignoring all but a small range of signals from customers. How much more can customers bring, and vendors embrace, if the range of signals and actions on the customer side are freed up?
We can answer that question with another one: How big do we want markets to be?
In Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky examines the effects of social networking tools, a disruptive fact of marketplace life for which the business world reached maximum thrall in 2011. (And with good reason: Facebook alone boasted 750 million users.) “None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared—relative, that is to the direct effort of the people they represent.”
While Clay’s focus is on the social, the personal remains more than implicit. Each of us has far more agency in the networked market than we could possibly enjoy in the industrialized marketplace. Since the two are becoming one, our agency will become valuable to industry.
So, then
When you limit what customers can bring to markets, you limit what can happen in those markets.
*Credit where due: Only Gemini gives links to its dialogs. (Correct me if I’m wrong about that. Here’s mine as far as I went with it (before going farther with Claude).
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