"Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life's currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose."
-- Thomas Szasz

Recently someone mentioned to me the Communications buzzword "parking lot." What a great metaphor. When I travel via air, my truck sits at the parking lot for days waiting for something to happen. It rains, shines, or even snows and yet everything remains unchanged. To have your ideas, career, and relationships placed in the parking lot is very much the same. It is a waiting game.

The opposite of parking lot stagnancy would be driving on the highway. The scenery changes and you are on the move. It requires a greater risk tolerance. It requires taking action. It requires active choice.

It is that fundamental human prerogative, or agency, that defines ideas and people as dwellers of the parking lot or of the highway. Both are active choices. One is the active choice to remain. It is no less of a choice but one with very different outcomes. The parking lot requires an external source of motivation, environmental change for something new to happen, idea to materialize, career to progress. If the environment remains the same the vehicle never gets used for its intended purposes and must be content to sit and rust.

Unfortunately, like my truck, for movement to occur without my agency would mean that it was struck by another vehicle or moved by a natural disaster. The agency of that move, however, would be external and out of my control. In human terms, that is often characterized by job loss or a personal crisis. In organizational terms, it is characterized by waiting too long to invest in your people, align your processes, react to change.

The highway is in and of itself an active choice to get on the road, make a difference, develop an idea, and be heard. This choice is one whereby the individual takes the transformative idea, makes the transformative move, and invokes his or her own agency to create change. How many great ideas are lost due to the lack of individual and organizational agency? The windows of opportunity open and shut very quickly.

My question is simple. Are you in the parking lot or on the highway? Individually, where do you exist from day to day? Corporately, if there is a change you know that you could deploy or recommend that would have a transformative impact on your organization, are you thinking about doing it... or doing it? Where is the source of your agency - is it from within or without?