A is for Actors & Agency
Agency specifies who is involved in implementing the transformation proposed. 1
Agency is the ability to initiate and manage the outcomes of actions for which one has communicated responsibility and accepted responsibility for being in charge of one’s actions.
Sensitivity to agency is separate from agency2; respectively, a consultant who guides engineering teams versus the project consultant who intervenes to submit a platform change. Note that we can extend the definition to emphasise that this is implicitly a non-deterministic alteration3 where the agent determines the exact steps to fulfil the transformation (T), regardless of who owns the transaction.
Establishing Perspectives on Job Seeker Agency
A job seeker has sufficient agency to consider perspectives and multiple aspects of a job search. Not all perspectives are equal from their unique viewpoint. However, job seekers have little say and minimal influence and control over the employment outcomes as they are never the decision-makers. The job and employment decision-making process is owned by someone else (O).
Realising Engineering Agency
Similarly, they might spend a lot of time measuring the deterministic aspects of their job-seeking activity.4 Journeys provide a metaphor ascribing ownership that pairs an agent with their actions. From this vantage, we build narratives around a [strengthened] belief in our abilities (self-efficacy) 5 and the influence of choices, effort, perseverance, and emotional reaction. Consequently, engineering teams can create solutions by applying agency. Realising the service customer’s agency, [data, analytics, and systems] engineers can freely express agency to build narratives around the customer developed, refined and expressed in terms of a Persona.
Scaffolding: Project Team Agency
In this context, Personas support and strengthen project members’ self-efficacy through scaffolding. Scaffolding around the abstraction of agency allows teams to design service touchpoints that generate measurable feedback from service users. This helps improve [customer] success and [brand] resilience; meanwhile, these traditional objectives of Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) also empower project team members.
Journey mapping helps to frame the endeavour and guide strategic action planning. Crucially, we invite the job-seeker to process emotional information tied to actions and behaviour by supporting their ability to reflect based on noted and, therefore, considered feedback.
We use a diamond to reflect that agency is a superpower in the job-seekers’ toolkit. It can be enacted through the cognitive reframing of situations. Feedback is vital as a sense of agency is otherwise subjective. If heightened or diminished, it can lead to irrational behaviour or inaction, depression and anxiety per Kaiser et al. (2021), who also warns of the higher cognitive demand of too much choice.6
References
Footnotes
(‘What is CATWOE, and what does it do?’, no date)↩︎
Agency (psychology), 2024. . Wikipedia.↩︎
Wrigley, T., 2020. Answer to “Definition of ‘agent’?” Philosophy Stack Exchange.↩︎
Monitoring: the volume of applications made by day x, responses received, and job sites used tells us little about landing the right job or the quality of roles we have applied for.↩︎
(Cherry, 2024)↩︎