There has always been something about the magic of moving across the world with the wind that has attracted me to sailing. Thousands of years before European explorers touched Pacific waters, Polynesians had already established networks of trade, exploration, and cultural exchange across Pacific islands separated by more than 2000 miles. This feat of Polynesian wayfinding without maps or compasses was considered so unfathomable that for centuries Western scholars simply didn’t believe it. They surmised that Polynesians must have populated these islands from accidental drift voyages. However, this doubt was dispelled when a navigator named Tupaia directed Captain Cook’s ship to a small island, which he’d never before visited, “simply by observing the flight patterns of birds, the set of the waves, and the color of the sky.” It was clear these Wayfinders had all the skills, knowledge, and confidence they needed to cross an ocean on purpose.
For me, learning to sail began with learning the countless tools and terms of modern sailing. “This rope?” I would ask, pointing to one of the sailboat’s many cords. And every time I blundered into this question the instructor returned the same smug response: “The only ‘rope’ on this boat is the one that rings the dinner bell.”
On a boat, a rope isn’t a rope. It’s a line, a halyard, a sheet… And then there are furling lines, and docking lines, and jib sheets and main sheets. Sailors are obsessed with giving every single thing on a boat its own unique name. At first, this hyper-specificity is exhausting. Do you really need a unique name for each edge and corner of a sail? (Which, by the way, includes the luff, the leech, the head, the foot, the tack, and the clew.) But, if you need your crew to maneuver quickly at sea – you don’t have time for confusion about which “rope” you need someone to crank. So even though the proliferation of terms can feel fussy and pedantic – once settled into the crew’s collective consciousness, the shared language offers powerful clarity – enabling a crew to do together what they could never do alone. (As observed by the cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, human agency can be radically expanded through social coordination.)
However, unlike most overly-specific terms in sailing, there is actually one word in the maritime world that doesn’t mean just one very specific thing. Rather, it’s a word that means everything – one Big Word that somehow holds it all together – encompassing the embodied wayfinding of ancient Polynesians as well as techniques that utilize modern tools and technologies to plan and pilot voyages large and small.
That word is Navigation.
At the Agency Fund we also have a Big Word – a word that encapsulates so much of what we think could make the social sector both more human and more effective.
That word is, of course, Agency.
For us, the concept of Agency holds it all together. It’s both the aspiration and the actions, both the learning and the doing, the what and the how that takes us from here to there.
But when a word means everything – it runs the risk of meaning nothing. And it might seem like we’re just greedy to pull all the good ideas under the Agency umbrella. As it happens, Navigation and Agency have a lot in common. I propose that exploring the multifaceted craft of Navigation might also help us unpack the rich concept of Agency so that we might share greater clarity about what we’re trying to do and how we can do it.
In future posts, we’ll further this metaphor by examining two key components of Navigation: Passage Planning and Piloting. But before we consider the “how” of navigation, let us first examine the why. After all, once you sail out of the harbor, you may be exposed to any number of hazards: shallow rocks, sea sickness, sudden storms and the like. Why navigate at all?
Like navigation, embracing agency can be dangerous.
In the contexts where we work, setting out on an agentic voyage can look like a farmer sowing a new crop, a young girl aspiring to become an engineer, an entrepreneur starting a new business, a couple trying to start a family, a teenager searching for mental health support, a community trying to build their first library, or an organization trying to promote justice and equality. Such agentic aspirations also come with risk: new crops and new businesses can fail, career aspirations can be dashed, pregnancy can be fraught with physical and emotional hazards, getting help for mental health can be terrifying, libraries can collapse, organizations can implode, and groups seeking equality can face backlash.
However, like navigation for a sailor, agency is also essential. As the saying goes, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” In the same way, we believe that humans are “built” to be agentic and that agency is essential to human survival and flourishing. In other words, Agency is not a luxury; it is vital.
There’s a reason why many sailboats have an “emergency rudder.” To be “rudderless” is to be subject to the wind and waves which could smash your vessel on the rocks or blow you out to sea to drift for weeks.
Navigation, like Agency, means harnessing the power to move in the direction you choose.
It’s transforming even headwinds into forward motion as you set your helm towards your intentions.
Moreover, many do not have the option to just “stay put” – no safe harbor or comfortable status quo to hide inside. If what it means to be “here” is untenable, undignified, unsatisfying, or unsustainable, then you must learn to Navigate whether you like it or not. Indeed, if you look more closely at the lives of people experiencing poverty and marginalization you will often find people who have managed to navigate seemingly impossible situations.
Unfortunately, experiences of poverty and marginalization can also undermine people’s agency when they need it the most. Whether because of material, social, or institutional constraints (perhaps a scarcity of wealth, time, respect, or trust) that which is adaptive in certain contexts of struggle or scarcity can also hamper the self-efficacy, learning, experimentation, and growth required to navigate towards a different reality.
So, regardless of whether you set sail to escape, to emigrate, to explore, or just to enjoy, acquiring the skills of navigation may be painstaking, but they are also essential. In other words, we invest in Agency not because we assume it will be the easiest way to effect lasting change, but because it may be the only way.
This blog is part of a series on Leveraging Personal Agency for International Development, a convening co-organized by The Agency Fund and the SEE Change Initiative at Johns Hopkins University.