Agency, which can be thought of as conscious actions, intervenes in systems by disrupting or transforming patterns and relationships.
Agency, which can be thought of as conscious actions, intervenes in systems by disrupting or transforming patterns and relationships.
You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World
Karen O'Brien • 1 highlight
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Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.
Simon Sarris • The Most Precious Resource is Agency
We are all entangled in systems that both ensure our survival and destruction. The responsibilities that we place on institutions, such as big oil, big banks, big pharma, etc., does not lie within these institutions but within the linkings between them. "An institution is made of people, each with their own biographies, and it exists within communi... See more
Nora Bateson • Nora Bateson — The Paradox of Agency
The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.
Gena Gorlin • Death is the default
A system is a set of things-people, cells, molecules, or whatever-interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time
Donella Meadows • Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller
How we relate to ourselves, each other, the environment, and the future creates patterns that tend to repeat themselves in a systematic manner, shaping both social and material structures and enabling or constraining the kinds of change we are able to achieve.
Karen O'Brien • You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World
individual change is collective change; we are inherently entangled through shared language, meaning, and values.
Karen O'Brien • You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World
"Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture." An individual both has a "unique perspective or epistemology" but also "there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions."