Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

2 min read Free

Agency series: #5 Initiative Without Judgment Becomes Chaos

High-agency people who lack judgment are disruptive in ways that look like competence from a distance. They're always doing something. They have ideas. They move fast. They don't wait. The problem is that their activity generates as much work and as many problems as it
2 min read Free

Agency series: #4 Why Judgment Makes Agency Useful

Agency without judgment is a liability. A person who acts boldly and constantly on incomplete information, without the ability to calibrate what they're seeing, will cause damage. They'll solve problems they created. They'll create new problems in the act of solving old ones. Their
2 min read Free

Agency series: #3 Agency Is Not Confidence, It's Responsibility

Confident people are often mistaken for high-agency people. This costs organizations more than it might seem — because confidence is visible and promoted, while agency is behavioral and easy to miss. Confidence is about how you feel. Agency is about what you do. These two things overlap sometimes, but they&
3 min read Free

Agency series: #2 High Agency vs Low Agency - What the Difference Actually Looks Like

The difference between high-agency and low-agency people is not immediately obvious from their resumes, their titles, or even their stated attitudes. It shows up in behavior — specifically, in what they do when the situation is unclear. The same situation, different responses Imagine this: a product team is preparing
2 min read Free

Agency series: #1 What Keeps Showing Up in Agency

Agency shows up everywhere once you know what to look for. In the engineer who spots a broken process and fixes it before being asked. In the operator who notices a deal slipping and mobilizes resources without waiting for an escalation. In the manager who, when handed an ambiguous problem,
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Technical literacy series: #10 Why Technical Literacy Is Now a Leadership Skill

Technical literacy used to be optional for many leaders. Strategy happened "above" the technology, and engineering translated direction into systems. That boundary has collapsed. Every function now runs on software, data, automation, integrations, platforms, permissions, and workflows. Marketing leaders make technical decisions when they choose automation tools. Sales
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Technical literacy series: #9 How Non-Engineers Earn Trust With Engineers

Trust with engineers is built through evidence. Not warmth, status, charisma, or repeated reassurance. Evidence. Engineers tend to track the gap between what people say and what systems do. That habit carries into cross-functional work. If you make vague claims, move scope casually, or negotiate estimates as if they
2 min read Free

Technical literacy series: #8 Developer Empathy Isn't Soft — It's a Technical Advantage

Developer empathy is not being nice to engineers. It is having a working model of what it is like to receive, implement, debug, operate, and maintain the decisions being made around you. For operators and leaders, that model is a technical advantage. It lets you predict friction before it appears

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