*Planted: 22 April 2025 | Last Tended: 22 April 2025* People crave genuine agency for high satisfaction in their work (see [[🌿 The Traffic Light Theory of Agency]]), but when can genuine agency backfire? When there is no *accountability*. There are certainly times when people who can be given genuine agency without any oversight or accountability and they can produce good outcomes. But for most people most of the time, genuine agency requires some kind of accountability — external or internal — in order to steer the work they’re doing with that agency into a good outcome. This is where the understanding of Strategy versus Approach comes into play for the Green Light group: when the product owners lay out the Strategy to hit and give the team agency on the Approach to solve for that Strategy, the Strategy is the accountability driver. It’s a visible target for the team to hit on the Approach. At various points in the development process, both the team and the product owners should be sitting down and asking together, “does this Approach effectively solve for this Strategy?” Doing this doesn’t take away agency — it gives the team the target to shoot for, but they still hold the ball in their hands and decide how to approach taking the shot. Let’s assume there’s a team that feels they have no agency and therefore they have low satisfaction in their work. Their solution is to ask for or demand more agency. So the product owners hand them that agency — they have free rein to make all decisions and all the resources they need to act on those decisions. The reins have been put in their hands; they have genuine agency for some indeterminate period of time. The problem is that the team will lack any accountability if the product owners didn’t also set the Strategy out ahead of time, or provide any framework that the team can use to assess over time whether their approach is successful. If the product owners let the team run on its own for some length of time without applying any accountability check-in, then the team can certainly have a bad outcome even if they had genuine agency.