We Don’t Have a Mandate: Act with Agency

“We don’t have a mandate.”

Every data, analytics and AI leader has heard some version of it.

Leadership has not made this a priority. The business is not aligned. We do not have the funding. No one has given us permission.

Sometimes those statements are true. A mandate can be useful. It can signal leadership support, clarify priority, make funding easier and provide air cover when the work becomes difficult. In complex organizations, visible support from senior leaders can matter a great deal.

But there is another version of “we don’t have a mandate” that is more dangerous.

It is the version that ends the conversation before anyone asks what is still possible. It turns the absence of authority into a reason for inaction. It allows us to avoid the harder question: What can we responsibly do anyway? 

That is the space we are opening in this session of Signal Without the Noise.

In the first session, we started with another familiar phrase: “We’ve tried that before.” That phrase freezes progress by turning the past into a veto. It says history has already spoken. It treats prior failure as permanent evidence instead of incomplete information.

“We don’t have a mandate” freezes progress in a different way. It turns authority into a prerequisite. It says movement cannot begin until someone with more power grants permission.

One is fear of the past. The other is fear of the future.

That is what makes these phrases so human. Organizations behave a lot like people. We overlearn from what hurt us before, then overprotect ourselves from what might hurt us next. We spend so much energy looking backward and forward that we lose sight of the only place where progress happens.

Progress happens in the present.

The past can inform it. The future can shape it. But neither should be allowed to freeze it.

That does not mean we should dismiss the past or ignore the future. The past contains real lessons. The future contains real risks. Leaders should honor both. But honoring them is different from surrendering to them.

Action, after all, has visible personal risk. If we act and something goes wrong, people can point to the decision. A path was chosen. A mistake can be named. Someone can be held accountable.

Inaction carries invisible organizational risk. If we do nothing, the harm often shows up later, somewhere else, carried by someone else. The workflow remains broken. The insight remains unused. The opportunity is lost, often with no one clearly to blame.

That is especially true in healthcare, where the cost of inaction can reach a clinician or a patient and their family at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

Too often, there is no visible cost for inaction, only risk in acting. Moving past that requires leaders willing to dare greatly.

Responsible leaders do not take reckless action simply because inaction has a cost. But they also do not confuse avoiding risk with avoiding harm.

Early in my career, I learned this lesson without fully realizing I was learning it.

I was at MCI, and they had recently come through a period of intense growth and success. MCI was one of the reasons consumers had long-distance choices. It helped create options in a market that had once been dominated by AT&T.

At the time, mass marketing was the primary tool for driving sales. But we could not keep up with AT&T’s funding machine. A few people began taking a different approach. They started experimenting with direct marketing, which was still fairly novel at the time. The most notable example was Friends and Family.

That work helped shift sales momentum. MCI began taking market share from AT&T and continued to do so for years. It was an exciting time and a tremendous growth opportunity.

But I did not like the leader I had become.

So I stepped away from leadership for a while. I was fortunate that MCI allowed me to do that. For the next six months, I became a LAN administrator.

Looking back, that was an agency moment. I passed on a leadership promotion and chose a different path because I needed to reset. I needed to step back from the version of leadership I had grown into and take responsibility for the kind of leader I wanted to become.

During that time, I started reading more about CRM. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers were pushing the idea of one-to-one marketing. Most of the progress in the field was still small scale. No one had really done it at scale. Friends and Family may have been one of the first serious attempts, but it was bespoke. The technology stack was expensive, heavily mainframe oriented and difficult to scale.

The industry, including MCI, was also addicted to the marketing drug of choice at the time: mass marketing. But the idea stayed with me. I could not stop thinking about it.

Eventually, I connected with a technical writer, and we started collaborating. We explored the idea, shaped it, argued with it and eventually landed on something we believed could matter. Then we pitched it to marketing.

That was another agency moment. We did not wait for someone to hand us a mandate. We saw something worth pursuing and started moving toward it. We created a proposal. We found interest. We began building belief.

It was not hard to sell the idea. It was much harder to sell the path to making it real.

There was no clean playbook. There was no obvious technology stack. There was no formal enterprise mandate sitting there waiting for us. There was curiosity, conviction and a belief that there was a better way to create value for the business and consumers.

Over time, we gained enough interest to begin exploring how to make it happen. Getting approval to do a pilot was another agency moment. It took a lot of selling and bartering just to piece together enough support and funding to get started. I remember thinking at the time that this was either the start of my next career at MCI or my last one. MCI was known for regular layoffs, and the rumor mill had it that we were next.  

Two years later, we had built what was, at the time, the largest CRM implementations in the world. Two years after that, it was driving a $5 billion revenue stream. Along the way, it helped drive adoption of a whole new way of doing business and a new generation of technology that enabled it. The work was novel and successful enough that we became a finalist for the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Innovation and Best Practices.

Looking back, I can see the risk more clearly now.

At the time, it did not feel as risky as it probably was. I was likely too inexperienced to fully appreciate the personal and professional risk involved. There were many hurdles. There were many reasons it could have failed. I remember agreeing that we would use leading-edge technology but avoid the bleeding edge at all costs. In the end, we were hemorrhaging. There were many points along the way where someone could have said, quite reasonably, “We don’t have a mandate for this.”

But that was not how we thought about it.

We did not wait for a mandate. We created the conditions for one.

The mandate did not create the momentum. The desire to do something meaningful and valuable for the organization created the momentum. The mandate came later, after the idea had earned belief, after people could see the possibility and after the work had enough substance for others to stand behind it.

That is the part of agency many leaders need first. When no mandate exists, agency is the willingness to take the next responsible step. Not the reckless step. Not the political end run. Not the heroic move that makes everything revolve around you. The responsible step.

Find the valuable problem. Find one willing collaborator. Test the idea where the risk is manageable. Create evidence. Build belief. Let the work earn the right to become more visible.

But there is a second part of agency, and it may be more important.

When I became a leader again, I had to become much better at creating an environment where others could take agency too. That was at the heart of our success.

Acting with agency is not the same as taking over. I learned that the hard way. A high-agency leader can create energy, movement and possibility. But if we are not careful, we can also consume too much oxygen. We can move so quickly toward what we believe is right that others have less room to contribute, question, shape or lead.

Part of the reason I stepped away from leadership was that I had been so busy taking agency that I did not fully appreciate how it affected the people around me. For some, it created an environment that promoted agency. For others, it did not.

That is the balance leaders have to learn.

Agency should not become another form of control. The goal is not simply to act with conviction. The goal is to act in a way that helps others rise with the work.

I saw that more clearly years later in healthcare, where the cost of delay can become deeply personal.

I remember someone at Seattle Children’s once saying, “Whether we do this this week, next month or next year, it does not matter.”

Few things get me more riled up than that kind of statement. What frustrated me so much was that the impact was invisible to them at that moment. So I explained what we were doing and why the timing mattered. I connected the work back to children and families whose lives could be improved by moving with more urgency.

I never heard that statement from them again. In fact, they became an advocate for the remainder of their tenure.

I could have taken a different path. I could have talked to their boss. I could have used the organizational power dynamic to make them act like time mattered. But that would have produced compliance, not conviction.

The better leadership move was to help them see why time mattered.

That is the difference between using authority and creating agency. You cannot mandate that people care. You can only help them see why the work matters. They have to choose.

I have come to see mandates as a leadership cheat in everyday ways too. If people are not coming to a meeting, mandating attendance may get them in the room. That is compliance. But it does not mean the meeting matters. Either the meeting is not worth having, or I have not done a good enough job helping people see why it matters.

That is mine to own.

That is why the way leaders use mandates matters. A leader with a mandate can use it to create an environment where people take agency, or they can use it as extrinsic motivation to drive compliance, often without even noticing it.

One path builds community. The other builds dependence.

We often talk about leaders empowering people, but that phrase has always felt incomplete to me. It can make empowerment sound like something a leader bestows. Leaders do not empower people. Leaders create the conditions where people choose to exercise power.

Agency works the same way. A leader can create clarity, support, protection and opportunity. A mandate can make agency easier, but people still have to choose ownership.

For data, analytics and AI leaders, this matters more than ever. Most organizations are not short on activity. They have dashboards, platforms, pilots, governance conversations, reporting backlogs and AI projects underway. The harder question is whether that activity is creating value and whether people feel enough ownership to carry the work forward when the path gets hard.

So when someone says, “we don’t have a mandate,” the wrong response is to stop. The better response is to ask what kind of agency is still available.

What can we learn? Who can we invite in? Where is there real value to create? What can we test without creating unnecessary risk? What evidence would help others believe? How do we move in a way that creates room for others to move with us?

Those questions do not eliminate the need for leadership support. They help create the conditions for it.

Because sometimes a mandate is not where the work begins. Sometimes it is what forms after enough people see that the work deserves to continue.

A mandate may get something started. Agency is what keeps it alive.

And in those moments, the leader’s job is not to wait passively for permission.

It is to act with agency — and create the conditions where others can act with agency too.