The Marionette Part 2: Paradox of Agency
This is the second of more articles to come about The Marionette. The first article, The Marionette Part 1: Portals of Potential, described the framework through micro behaviours and macro patterns and structures that endow full agency and potential.
Portals of potential are not just metaphors. Portals are active interfaces between potential and realized agency. As individuals move through these portals, they bring their values, experiences, and assumptions into contact with an organization’s culture, behavioral patterns, structures, and power dynamics. Agency determines the outcome of the interactions: whether actors conform to existing norms, challenge dominant paradigms, or reshape the system itself. These encounters do not merely define what is possible, but actively shape how potential unfolds within and across systems.
The Marionette is a system framework and intervention tool that reveals, analyzes, and activates agency across multiple layers of complexity. It empowers individuals and organizations to identify feedback loops, engage reflexively with system dynamics, and intervene intentionally to disrupt entrenched patterns. Through this iterative process, The Marionette helps identify system boundaries.
This article explores how The Marionette works with the dimensions of agency. Specifically, we will be looking at how the Actor’s agency manifests in system feedback.
Introduction to Agency and Systems Dynamics
Imagine a crowded room thick with tension. Suddenly, a rock is thrown. The impact is immediate — disruption ripples through the space, unsettling the equilibrium. Yet before anyone can identify the source, the hand that hurled the rock vanishes into the crowd. The disturbance lingers, but the Actor responsible remains hidden, leaving the consequences to unfold. This metaphor goes beyond evading responsibility: it exposes a deeper truth about how individuals and groups navigate complex systems. It reveals how agency often operates in the shadows, where actions produce tangible effects in the form of feedback loops.
Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische define human agency as temporal processes of social engagement with structures and relations — one that is shaped by the past (through ingrained habits), directed toward the future (by imagining alternative possibilities), and responsive to the present (by adapting to immediate circumstances).
At the individual level, agency is shaped by emotions, beliefs, and lived experiences. The Actor navigates systemic constraints, making choices — whether to comply, resist, or innovate — in response to external pressures (as illustrated by the Strings). These choices are not made in isolation. They are conditioned by norms and reinforced by patterns that regulate what actions are viable within the system.
Over time, individual choices aggregate, forming collective behaviors and reinforcing system-wide patterns. This is where feedback loops come into play: they channel individual actions into either reproductive or transformative pathways. When most individuals align their choices with system expectations, the system stabilizes and reproduces itself. But when collective action disrupts expectations, it creates fractures that introduce the potential for transformation.
At the systemic level, agency operates within power-laden environments where access to resources, authority, and influence determines who can alter systems. However, power asymmetries shape the distribution of agency; some actors can more easily disrupt or reshape systems, while others are forced into reproductive roles. These Structures, as illustrated by the Fingers, function as gatekeepers, dictating whose agency is amplified and whose is neutralized.
For marginalized groups, systemic constraints often force them into adaptive strategies to navigate existing hierarchies:
- Code-Switching: Adjusting language, behavior, and presentation to conform to dominant cultural norms in order to gain access, avoid punishment, or increase influence within power structures.
- Strategic Assimilation: Aligning with system expectations just enough to operate within them while quietly pushing for change from within.
- Double-Consciousness: Maintaining awareness of both dominant and marginalized perspectives, allowing individuals to anticipate systemic barriers and adjust their engagement accordingly.
- Resistance Through Compliance: Performing expected roles while subtly subverting norms to challenge authority in ways that are less immediately detectable.
While these strategies may offer individual mobility, they often come at a cost — demanding cognitive and emotional labor that reinforces existing hierarchies rather than dismantling them. To fully appreciate the depth of agency within the Marionette, it is essential to recognize its recursive relationship with structures: what Anthony Giddens describes as the duality of structure. Agency is not merely reactive to structures; it reproduces and transforms them through iterative loops of action and reflection.
Reproductive Loops: Agency in Service of Stability
In reproductive loops, agency is exercised within predefined constraints thereby reinforcing systemic patterns rather than challenging them. This form of agency is adaptive, ensuring survival and mobility within existing structures:
- The Actor: Adopts strategies like code-switching, strategic assimilation, and resistance through compliance to navigate the system without directly disrupting the structures. These strategies are more than cognitive or strategic, they are deeply affective, shaped by emotional responses to the system.
- Patterns: Normalize and reinforce expected behaviors, rewarding conformity while subtly discouraging deviation.
- Regulator: Acts as gatekeeper that defines the boundaries of acceptable action, controlling access to resources, opportunities, and legitimacy.
- Structures: Cement power hierarchies, dictating which forms of agency are permitted and which are neutralized.
- Organization/System: Modulates the tension between compliance and disruption that keeps the system intact.
Transformative Loops: Agency as a Catalyst for Change
In transformative loops, agency disrupts entrenched patterns, actively challenging systemic inertia and creating pathways for new possibilities:
- The Actor: Engages in discursive reflexivity, questioning norms, exposing contradictions, and leveraging openings for disruption.
- Patterns: Become sites of resistance, where individuals and collectives introduce alternative behaviors that challenge dominant norms.
- Regulator: Experiences constant tension, adaptation and renegotiation as power dynamics shift.
- Structures: Experience pressure as feedback loops amplify dissonance, forcing adaptation or collapse of outdated systems.
- Organization/System: Evolves, shaped by continuous interactions between regulators, actors, and shifting purpose, values, cultures and beliefs.
By making these loops visible, The Marionette helps us to recognize where agency is trapped in reproductive cycles and where it has the potential to break through, recalibrate system boundaries, and catalyze transformation.
The Paradox of Agency: Navigating Freedom and Constraint
At this point, we’ve explored how agency functions within feedback loops, determining whether systems are reproduced or transformed. What emerges from this exploration is the paradox of agency — the tension between freedom and constraint that defines how agency operates within systems.
On one hand, agency allows individuals to shape systems, to challenge entrenched norms, and to open pathways for change. It’s the freedom to act, reflect, and introduce new possibilities. However, agency is always exercised within the framework of structures — the power dynamics, cultural norms, and institutional expectations that define the limits of what can be done. While we can disrupt and transform systems, our ability to do so is always influenced by the very structures we aim to change. This creates a cycle where agency, even in its most transformative forms, is both a tool for change and a product of the systems we wish to alter.
This paradox is crucial for understanding the complex interplay between agency and system, Actor & Structure. While it’s tempting to imagine agency as a purely independent force for transformation, it is constantly shaped and constrained by the systems in which it operates. This tension underscores the importance of reflexivity — our ability to reflect on, adapt to, and challenge systems — while recognizing the structural conditions that define what is possible.
Reclaiming Agency
Agency isn’t just about reacting to systems. It is also about shaping them. The Marionette reveals how feedback loops either keep us stuck in old patterns or open doors to transformation. The power to create change lies in how we engage with these loops. By recognizing them, challenging inertia, and redefining boundaries, individuals and organizations can move from passive participation to active transformation. Real change happens when we step into our agency, disrupt what no longer serves us, and build systems that reflect our values and vision for the future.
This article was co-written by Anthony Johnson, Adam Lerner, Anna Denardin, and May Bartlett.
It’s Showtime!
We publicly unveiled The Marionette with two workshops on April 8th and 17th. We have a six-week coaching program, Seeing Systems, launching on May 14, 2025, with more programs to be announced soon.
If you’re curious how The Marionette could be applied within your team, we’d love to explore with you!
