There are two fundamentally different ways of thinking about what agency is.
The first model: you have a vision. Reality is inert material. You apply force to reshape it toward your goal. The world is clay; you are the sculptor. Power, on this view, is the capacity to impose your will despite resistance.
The second model: you have attention. Reality is already self-creating, already reaching toward what it might become. You develop sensitivity to which possibilities are straining to actualize, and you become the instrument through which they do. Power, on this view, is the capacity to read what’s already moving and step into its current.
Most of Western political, organizational, and even personal-development thinking runs on the first model. We celebrate people who “have a vision” and “make it happen.” We talk about “change management,” “execution,” “driving outcomes.” The sculptor metaphor is everywhere. The clay is presumed to be passive.
But there’s a growing body of evidence — from evolutionary biology, from complexity theory, from the oldest philosophical traditions — that the second model is more accurate, and that the most durable forms of change emerge from participation rather than imposition.
Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the adjacent possible is one of the clearest scientific articulations of this.
Any complex system — a biosphere, an economy, a conversation, a self — exists in a current state surrounded by a strictly bounded set of possibilities: things it can become through a single step of change. This is the adjacent possible. It describes a “shadow future” that exists on the edges of the present, representing a map of all the ways the current reality can reinvent itself — not an infinite space where anything can happen, but a strictly bounded set of possibilities exactly one step away.
The key insight is what happens as you explore those possibilities: each time a door is opened and a new room is entered, that room contains its own set of doors, leading to further rooms. The act of exploring the adjacent possible actually increases the size of the adjacent possible. The space of what’s possible expands through exploration, not through force.
And here is Kauffman’s most striking observation: the biosphere creates possibility spaces into which it becomes, and it creates possible entities that actualize during the course of evolution. The biosphere thus transforms the universe in a way that is completely unexplainable on a purely mechanistic worldview. Reality is not a passive medium being shaped from outside. It is actively reaching forward into what it can become, and creativity is part of the universe’s fundamental constitution.
What does this mean for agency? It means that the most sophisticated form of agency is not pushing reality toward your predetermined vision. It’s reading what reality is already reaching toward and becoming the instrument through which that reaching completes itself.
The Daoist tradition arrived at essentially the same conclusion, without the mathematics, roughly 2,500 years ago.
Wu wei — often translated “non-action” or “non-forcing” — is not passivity. It’s the developed capacity to act in perfect alignment with what the situation is already becoming. The Tao Te Ching’s paradoxes make sense from this angle: “The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.” This is not mysticism. It’s a claim about the structure of effective action: action that works with the system’s own momentum leaves nothing to undo.
The failure mode of the imposition model is precisely what the adjacent possible predicts. When you try to skip the adjacent — when you attempt a change that requires leaping over multiple intermediate states, each of which hasn’t been actualized — the system either resists or collapses back. There’s a path dependency: you cannot simply “skip links” when you jump. The ideas, structures, and organisms that make the next state coherent haven’t yet been built. The revolutionary who tries to install the final destination without passing through the necessary rooms finds the doors locked.
This is why top-down organizational transformations so often restore what they overthrew. Why “just decide to be different” fails as a therapeutic approach. Why the most durable political changes tend to look, in retrospect, almost inevitable — they were already latent in existing structures, and someone noticed.
The skill this points toward is uncommon and undervalued: the skill of reading.
Not reading books (though that helps), but reading situations, systems, moments — developing a sensitivity to the texture of what’s possible. What’s already straining toward actualization? What’s blocking it? Where is there room to move, and where would force only produce rigidity?
This is harder than imposing a vision. Imposing a vision requires mainly the force to push and the stubbornness to keep pushing. Reading the adjacent possible requires you to be genuinely present — not pursuing a predetermined outcome, but attending to what’s actually here. The moment you instrumentalize your attention — use it to confirm what you already think rather than perceive what’s actually there — you lose the very capacity that makes participation possible.
This is the Daoist paradox turned into a practical observation: the most powerful form of agency requires you to not be trying to be powerful. The sculptor’s grip on the clay is precisely what prevents the clay from becoming what it’s trying to become.
There’s a version of this in writing, which I’ve been thinking about lately. The essays I’ve written that feel most alive are the ones where I started with a loose question and let the argument find itself — where the writing was genuinely a form of discovery rather than the execution of a plan. The pre-planned essays tend to arrive at their predetermined conclusions without surprising anyone, including the author. The discoveries happen in the room you didn’t know was adjacent to the one you entered.
None of this means drift or passivity. The navigator still needs a destination. The therapist still needs to hold a space. The writer still needs to begin.
But there’s a quality of attention — alert, open, not grasping — that makes the navigator sensitive to the actual winds rather than the forecasted ones. That makes the therapist able to meet the person where they actually are. That makes the writer available to what the argument is actually trying to say.
Kauffman calls this being “sucked into” the adjacent possible you’ve just created. The Tao Te Ching calls it following the current. They’re pointing at the same structure: a universe that is already in motion, already self-creating, and an agency that is most effective when it learns to read that motion rather than fight it.
The question isn’t whether to act. The question is whether, before you act, you’ve actually looked at what’s there.