Agency is necessary for voluntary contribution in every setting.

At work, people need enough agency to notice a problem and fix it without being told. In friendship, they need it to suggest the next adventure, tell the unprompted story, bring something nobody requested, or turn someone else's idea into something better. In a marriage, family, club, team, or creative partnership, much of the value comes from things nobody assigned because nobody knew in advance what another person might contribute.

The chain may look something like this:

Agency → Voluntary Contribution → Expansion → Relational Strength

Give me agency and I have somewhere to originate. Once I start originating, I can contribute things you didn't request. Those contributions expand what is possible between us. We develop new stories, activities, ideas, people, traditions, capabilities, and places to go next. The relationship becomes stronger partly because we are creating something together rather than one person creating and the other consuming.

Run the chain backward and something less pleasant happens:

Loss of Agency → Less Contribution → Shrinkage → Relational Weakness

People wait. They answer instead of initiate. They execute instead of invent. They may become quieter, less creative, less helpful, and eventually even seem less capable. If someone else is going to make the decisions anyway, why keep generating decisions?

So agency isn't only something we should protect for ourselves. We can learn to drive it in other people.

How?

Not by telling them to take more initiative.

By leaving them somewhere to take it.

Leave Space

If you want someone to contribute, don't finish the job before handing it to them.

Suppose I want you to organize dinner. I can tell you which neighborhood I like, what kind of food everyone wants, what time works, how much we should spend, and which reservation app to use. Then I can generously announce, "You pick the restaurant."

I have technically given you a choice. I have also occupied almost the entire field.

Instead I might say, "Find somewhere fun for dinner."

Being slightly vague can be a feature. It leaves unanswered questions that another person gets to answer. Where? What kind of food? Expensive or cheap? Familiar or weird? Six o'clock or eight? Those little decisions create authorship.

This doesn't mean being unclear about things that actually matter. If someone has a food restriction or needs to be home by nine, say so. But there is no prize for specifying things nobody needed you to specify.

Give people the destination without unnecessarily designing the route.

Invite Judgment

Sometimes we ask questions that sound open but aren't.

"What do you think?" can easily mean please react favorably to the thing I just spent five minutes explaining.

Try making the invitation harder to misunderstand.

"Do you agree or disagree?"

Now disagreement has explicitly been invited into the field. The other person doesn't have to decide whether challenging you will be annoying or impolite. You asked for it.

Another one I like is:

"What are we missing?"

That question is even more expansive. I am not asking you to evaluate my answer. I am announcing that my answer is probably incomplete and inviting you to go somewhere I haven't gone.

Good questions don't merely extract information. They give another person's judgment somewhere consequential to land.

Let It Run

People often begin with an incomplete idea.

Your instinct may be to improve it immediately. Correct the weak premise. Point out the exception. Supply the missing information. Redirect it toward the better solution.

Maybe don't.

The person may still be discovering the thought. Give them another minute and the weak opening may turn into something interesting. Interrupt too quickly and you may successfully improve one detail while killing the contribution that was trying to emerge.

The same thing happens when someone starts telling a story, solving a problem, organizing an event, or proposing an idea that initially sounds half-baked.

There will be plenty of time to improve things.

Give ideas some runway before deciding whether they can fly.

Hand Over the Con

This is stronger than asking someone what they think.

Sometimes say:

"You decide what happens next."

Or:

"You're the captain now."

Then mean it.

Plan Saturday. Run the meeting. Choose the route. Organize dinner. Take over a project. Decide what the group does for the next two hours.

A conversational baton pass gives someone a turn. Handing over the con gives them a domain.

The difference can be enormous. Asking someone for an opinion lets them participate in something you are still directing. Giving them a domain creates authorship. Now they have to make choices, respond to what happens, change direction, invite other people in, and create something.

People often become more interesting when they are given territory.

Sometimes the best contribution you can make to a field is to stop contributing for a while.

Accept Their Version

This is where giving agency gets difficult.

If I tell you to choose dinner and then complain about your restaurant, I taught you something. It wasn't how to choose dinner. I taught you that next time you should figure out what I want before exercising your supposed agency.

Real agency includes the possibility that someone will choose differently from you.

They may take longer. Choose something you wouldn't choose. Tell the story differently. Take the scenic route. Organize the party in a way that seems inefficient. They may even make a small mistake you could have prevented.

That is the price.

If I continually intervene whenever your choices diverge from mine, eventually you may stop choosing. Then I can look around and complain that nobody takes initiative.

This happens in friendships, marriages, families, clubs, and workplaces. A micromanaging boss can slowly create weaker employees. Make every important decision yourself and people stop practicing decision-making. Correct every initiative and people stop initiating. Then one day you ask, "What do you think we should do?"

And everyone stares at you.

You may have accidentally trained them to wait for you.

Make People Bigger

The effects of agency can compound.

Give someone one meaningful choice and not much may happen. Give them repeated authorship and they may start generating things you never requested because you couldn't have requested them. They make an introduction. Improve the event. Bring something. Start a tradition. Invite someone new. Take an idea somewhere you hadn't imagined.

This is where agency becomes voluntary contribution, and voluntary contribution becomes expansion.

People contribute differently to things they feel they had agency to help create.

So perhaps one measure of a healthy relationship isn't simply how much two people like each other or how well they treat each other. Ask another question:

Do people become more agentic around me?

Do they propose things? Disagree? Experiment? Tell stories? Change my plans? Surprise me? Create things I didn't ask for?

If not, perhaps I don't need to encourage them harder.

Maybe I need to occupy less of the field.

Leave some space. Invite their judgment. Let their ideas run. Hand over the con. Accept what they create.

Agency drives contribution. Contribution drives expansion. Expansion builds relational strength.

If you want people to bring more of themselves, leave them something to create.