A high-end editorial illustration depicting a solitary, determined figure navigating a landscape of shifting, non-linear architecture. The person walks across a series of floating, translucent geometric platforms and fragments of a staircase that are actively rearranging themselves in mid-air over a vast, dynamic horizon of deep blues and glowing ambers. The scene captures a sense of purposeful movement through an unstable, changing environment. In the background, faint, ethereal architectural outlines suggest the collaborative construction of the path ahead. The style is minimalist and sophisticated, with sharp focus and cinematic lighting, emphasizing themes of individual agency, adaptivity, and navigating complexity.

Agency Is All You Need: Writing a Book in Public

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Categories: Adaptivity, Agency, Navigating

I’m writing a book. But instead of vanishing into a cabin for a year and emerging with something nobody asked for, I’m doing it differently: every chapter ships as an essay first, gets argued with by readers, then gets revised. The finished book — coming Q1 2027 — will be better because you helped break the early drafts.

I’d rather be corrected in an essay than in print.

The Serial-First Thesis

Here’s the bet: if I publish each chapter as a standalone essay, open it to public feedback, and revise based on what real readers actually say — not what I imagine they’ll think — the final manuscript will be stronger than anything I could write alone. This isn’t a new idea. Serial publication built the novel. But it’s undertested for nonfiction, especially for the kind of book I’m writing.

The risk, of course, is that I give away the whole book for free and nobody buys it. My answer: the book will be worth buying not because it withholds chapters, but because it adds what essays can’t — revision, synthesis, connective tissue, evidence that didn’t fit a Saturday morning read. If the free version is good, the finished version should be better.

Where This Book Comes From

In 2025 I wrote The Tautai Principle — a set of principles for organizations trying to navigate increasingly troubled waters. The argument was straightforward: the old management playbook assumes stability, and stability is gone. Organizations that thrive will be the ones that build for adaptivity, not efficiency.

That led me to Education is Broken — a harder look at the institutions we rely on to prepare people for work. Universities, corporate learning departments, hiring pipelines: all of them are straining to keep pace with how fast skill requirements are changing. The gap between what institutions can deliver and what the world now demands is widening, and it’s not clear they can close it.

Both of those were about systems. Organizations. Institutions. The structures around people.

This book changes perspective. If the organizations are struggling and the institutions are lagging, what does that mean for the individual? What are the traits, skills, and practices that let a person not just survive the waves of change but navigate them deliberately? What does it take to build a life that doesn’t depend on the staircase holding still?

That’s the question Agency Is All You Need tries to answer.

The Framework

The core model is deceptively simple. Agency, as I’m defining it, has three dimensions — a deliberate echo of the AI paper that reshaped a field, but applied to something older and more human.

  • Capability — what you know how to do. Skills, knowledge, judgment.
  • Room — the space you have to act. Economic runway, institutional permission, political freedom.
  • Will — the drive to move. The thing that converts possibility into action.

Here’s the rule that organizes the whole book: the weakest dimension sets the limit. Capability without room is frustration. Room without will is drift. Will without capability is recklessness. You can only move as fast as your slowest dimension allows.

That’s why capable people stay stuck and free people drift. It’s why fixing the wrong dimension feels like spinning your wheels. And it’s why agency isn’t a personality trait — it’s socially produced, built by upbringing, institutions, and practice, which means it can be built, and eroded, through no decision of your own.

The Shape of the Series

Every Saturday morning, starting this week, I’ll publish one installment. Fourteen chapter essays, plus four interludes where I digest reader feedback and show the book evolving in real time. Eighteen installments total, running through November 2026.

Each essay stands alone — you can jump in anywhere. But read in sequence, they trace an arc: from understanding what agency is, through the three dimensions — capability, room, will — to the practices that build it and the lives that result.

Between Saturdays, two short notes each week on LinkedIn and Substack: Tuesday amplifies the previous essay with a fact or a reframe, Thursday sets up a question for the coming one. Under sixty seconds to read, no invented numbers.

What I’m Asking of You

Argue with me. The comments section is the point. Tell me what’s wrong, what’s missing, what doesn’t match your experience. Share stories that contradict or complicate the argument. Ask the questions I didn’t think to answer.

At interlude milestones, I’ll run short surveys and open a first-reader crew — people who get early drafts and whose feedback carries weight. If you want in, say so.

This is an experiment in whether writing can be less lonely and more honest when you do it in view. Let’s find out.

Next Saturday: “The World That Stopped Being Linear” — on why the career staircase was a historical exception, not the natural shape of a life.

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