There’s a line in Ben Kuhn’s essay, “Impact, agency, and taste”, that’s been rattling around in my head lately. He describes impact as the practice of “making success inevitable”. That phrase captures something important about how to approach work.

Kuhn draws a distinction between two ways of approaching a project or goal:

There’s a huge difference between the following two operating modes:

  1. My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to get people started working on it ASAP.
  2. My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to list out everything that needs to get done by then, draw up a schedule working backwards from the ship date, make sure the critical path is short enough, make sure we have enough staffing to do anything, figure out what we’ll cut if the schedule slips, be honest about how much slop we need, track progress against the schedule and surface any slippage as soon as I see it, pull in people from elsewhere if I need them…

Mode 1, as Kuhn later points out, makes you a “leaky abstraction.” If the project is important, someone else has to worry about whether it will actually succeed, constantly monitoring and figuring out how to resolve blockers that you might not even see coming.

Mode 2, on the other hand, is about “making success inevitable”. It’s about taking true accountability for actually achieving the goal not just for doing the work.

Owning the Outcome

This idea of “making success inevitable” struck me as a valuable mindset for anyone aiming to have a significant impact, regardless of their role. While the responsibility for a project’s overall success might formally fall more heavily on someone with a title that indicates this responsibility (e.g. a tech lead (TL) or manager), the practice of thinking and acting in Mode 2 is something any engineer can develop.

When I reflect on my own experience, transitioning within a team from an individual contributor to TL role certainly made the Mode 2 thinking much more explicit. Suddenly, the scope of concern broadened from “is my part done well?” to “will this initiative/project land successfully?” With multiple people and dependencies involved, you need to avoid becoming a leaky abstraction. The feedback loops get less explicit, and you need to more frequently move from tactical to strategic thinking.

However, high-impact ICs usually exhibit these same traits. They don’t “just” execute tasks; they anticipate problems, clarify ambiguity, proactively communicate risks, plan future work, and drive things forward with a focus on the ultimate objective. They internalize whatever the true end goal is and take ownership beyond their immediate assigned slice.

Kuhn highlights just how valuable this capability is:

People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once. So if someone else is responsible for making your project inevitable, you’re consuming some of that scarce resource; if you’re the one making your own projects inevitable, you’re a producer of that resource, and you’re helping unblock a key constraint for your team.

While TLs and managers are often the institutionally designated providers of this resource, that doesn’t mean they always fulfill that role effectively, nor does it mean ICs can’t. We’ve all likely seen managers who operate in Mode 1, pushing the burden of ensuring success onto their reports. Conversely, highly effective ICs often step up, implicitly or explicitly, to make their own projects (and sometimes those around them) inevitable, and thus producers of that scarce resource.

The Scarce Resource: Agency

The scarce resource Kuhn is identifying is agency. It’s the quality that separates merely “doing work” (Mode 1) from “owning the outcome” (Mode 2). Agency encompasses the initiative, proactiveness, resourcefulness, and sheer relentlessness required to navigate ambiguity and push something across the finish line, ensuring it actually achieves its intended goal. It doesn’t always require inhabiting the “operator” mindset, as agency also includes the ability to think strategically and to make tough decisions, but highly agentic people do know when to deploy both the “operator” and “strategist” mindset.

While some people seem naturally more inclined towards high-agency behavior, I strongly believe it’s also a skill that can be developed and practiced. Interestingly, I’ve often observed that particularly promising engineers already possess a significant degree of latent agency. They have the technical skills, the problem-solving ability, and often the right intuitions. What they sometimes lack isn’t the capability, but the permission or encouragement to fully exercise it.

Exercising agency, especially when it involves pushing back on initial plans, identifying non-obvious risks, or proactively coordinating across teams, can feel like overstepping boundaries or one’s formal job title. This is particularly true for those earlier in their careers or newer to a team. Creating an environment of psychological safety, where team members feel explicitly empowered and encouraged by senior folks or leadership to take initiative and question assumptions, is important for unlocking this potential agency. Without that safety net, agency often remains latent.

Developing Agency

Striving for “inevitability”, as Kuhn frames it, isn’t about achieving perfection or eliminating all risk. That’s clearly impossible in most nontrivial areas of human endeavor. Instead, I think the real value lies in cultivating the mindset itself.

Adopting this agentic mindset takes conscious effort, especially initially. It means spending more time up-front planning, anticipating, and communicating, which can sometimes feel less immediately productive than jumping into writing code, or whatever the immediate “work” may be. However, investing time in up-front strategic thinking consistently pays off later. Having a strategy results in less frantic firefighting, fewer deadline slips, and a generally calmer, more predictable process for delivering impact.

The benefits of cultivating personal agency are beyond “merely” delivering reliable outcomes to achieve some abstract team/company/personal OKR. There’s a certain confidence and personal satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve done the work to truly understand the problem, anticipate hurdles, and steer yourself toward success, rather than hoping things work out or leaning on someone else to keep the project unblocked. Agency also generalizes well across different domains of life. Developing agency in a professional context usually results in a higher ability1 to exercise agency in other contexts (e.g. personal, social, relational). Professional contexts are a good environment for developing agency too: in healthy workplaces, there is a clear feedback loop and ample opportunity to exercise agency.

In my experience, developing the agency to make an impact on your (sometimes chaotic) environment feels like a worthwhile pursuit in itself. It also reflects quite well on promotion packages, if that’s your jam.

Further Reading

  1. I intentionally use the word “ability” here. I’m more confident that the skill of agency generalizes well than I am that the propensity to use it generalizes. This Cate Hall post on selective agency describes this in more detail. ↩︎