To be developed: on the joys of agency theory, and how that works out on micro scales throughout organisations. Quite a bit of thinking, and even more of writing, will follow here. Will only ‘officially’ post this post after elucidation to satisfaction. Though your comments are welcomed, already. …
First there was the translation (‘folding into’) of it called Governance, and the mass of organisational psychology and Internal Organisation, with all the Me Versus the Organisation translation of societal isolation that turned inward; the organisation as alien society for many.
Now, there is the agentic movement; replace as many humans doing repetitive work (with creative / ad-hoc flexibility aspects ever more) with agents, either single big ones (qua eventual code base) of superagents (orchestrators) with many ad hoc spawned dummy agent’lets under control – bringing back all the issues with e.g., authorisations, defecting agents, etc. so we find ourselves back at ◻1. Having to find out how to do oversight, monitoring and control.
This’all, nicely starting off with a paragraph Agency Theory primer, then a couple of paragraphs on the joys of (proper!) audits, plus a bit on how Audit is changing due to the availability (!) of agents to do the grunt work, flipping to a bottom-up discussion on auditing agentified environments, the controls re that, and the internal and external governance that applies.
Noting all the way that ‘governance’ is about the sum total governance over an entire F1 crew, so to speak, not, as it is applied today too often, only about ‘monitoring of the coffee bean supply in the pits’. That’s hardly ‘management’ in the original sense.
