URSABLOG: As Agents Only?

Have you ever had that unnerving – and sometimes embarrassing – situation where a word that you thought meant one thing actually means another? It happens quite a lot to me, and not just in Greek, in English too. A word like – say – ‘dissemble’ turns out to mean something else altogether different from what I thought it meant, and also, more worryingly, how I had been using it. It may be some small comfort that no one has pulled me up on it, but the slightly unnerving thought then follows that I have not been making myself clear, or worse, that a whole lot of people think that I am a pompous idiot. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. But it struck me recently that another word – ‘agency’ – is equally misleading, because it has two, almost contradictory meanings, and both go to the heart of my professional and personal life.

As it turns out, there are many different meanings of the terms ‘agent’ and ‘agency’, such as an organisation or government department providing a particular service (like the CIA), or in the private sector (a travel agent for example), but there are two meanings that are of particular interest to me.

One is the ‘agency’ which denotes an action or intervention: through the agency of a friend of the family, a specialist doctor was found, or through the agency of running water, a valley was formed.

The other is in the more legal sense: under English Law, agency is where one person or company (the agent) is authorised by another (the principal) to act on their behalf, creating legal relations with a third party. The agent’s authorised actions bind the principal, effectively making the principal a party to contracts negotiated by the agent.

The first is possessed, used, and acted on by the person (or company) to make things happen. The second is given to the person (or company) by the principal to get things done on their behalf, and not only does the agent have to wait for the necessary authorisation from the principal, they cannot act without it.

Both meanings of the word permeate my life – and many others in the shipping industry – but I hadn’t until recently thought much about it. But I have found that I may have been confusing the two, using them in the wrong places – and worse – being torn between the two, ending in inaction, or stasis. And the more I think about it, the more I think that I have been trapped in a philosophical error, or paradox, where I have confused action with signal, and vice versa. (And now I really do sound like a genuine pompous idiot.)

Let me try and explain: a shipbroker’s – and especially a ship sale and purchase broker’s – life is about pushing, reading people, situations, creating ideas, making suggestions, coming up with solutions for the problems that until now people didn’t even know they had. But they need a green light (even the faintest will do) to get moving. I am fond of saying that a broker cannot just sit under a tree and wait for fruit to fall into his lap when it is ripe, they need to shake the tree for it to fall, and sometimes they even need to climb the tree and see if there is any fruit worth picking.

In other words, they cannot wait for deals to come “off the machine”, for instructions to arrive in response to a circular, or for an email authorising them to find a particular ship for them. It does happen occasionally, but so rarely that the times when it does are memorable. Mostly brokers are calling, testing, nudging, suggesting, and so on, in the hope that ‘through their agency’ they will be instructed ‘as agents’ to follow up on the idea.

You can see the problem: brokers are using their agency (as action) – and very irritating it can be too for the recipient – to manoeuvre themselves into a situation where they can receive instructions to act on their principal’s behalf. And many shipowners do many deals as the result of such agency by the shipbrokers, so it is worth doing, and repeating.

In the majestic BBC television series Smiley’s People from the book of the same name by John le Carré, the character Oliver Lacon addresses George Smiley (played brilliantly by Alec Guinness) on the subject of the latter’s wayward wife:

“You know, if Ann had been your agent instead of your wife, you’d probably have run her pretty well.”

Side-stepping the issue of yet another meaning of the word agent, the most able, successful and, dare I say it, ruthless of brokers have famously (and infamously) the most disrupted and complicated of personal lives. This is not confined to shipbroking.

It’s as if the most successful of people – and many not so successful – have immersed themselves so much in the rules of the game (whatever particular game they are playing) that normal life remains a puzzle to them. The philosophy, mores and conventions of their professional lives leak into, and infect their personal lives.

Speaking for myself, if my professional life is spent ‘shaking the tree’ so to speak, in the hope that an instruction – or an approval – to proceed will come from it, it is no wonder that I have come to take a similar approach elsewhere in my life. In business I can be charming, intimidating, non-committable, dissembling (I think I’ve used the word correctly here), devious, confrontational, all the time scanning for a signal that will allow me to proceed. In the process I forget that I am the principal of my own life, and it is my own agency that is needed. I have to act on my own behalf, and on my own; but many times I find myself waiting for the authority to act, which I imagine leaves me looking a bit spineless and indecisive.

When my professional life needs a little patience, with more work done on explaining, sharing my thoughts, giving reasons, or simply listening rather than bounding into action at the first sniff of a deal, I get impatient and feel trapped by the lack of action, usually because my principal does not think it’s the right thing to do at that particular time, and is not authorising me to proceed.

Conversely, when my personal life could do with a gesture, a defining statement, an intervention from me that would at least try and clarify the situation, I hesitate to act definitively: I do not authorise myself to proceed. Instead, I find myself waiting for a signal, an instruction, an approval rather than taking agency into my own hands and just getting on with it.

But maybe I am overthinking this, or – more likely – instead of being trapped in a philosophical error I am just being a self-obsessed prick. Whether an agent is legal, action, or espionage is neither one thing or the other: more than one thing can be true at the same time. One of the curses of shipbroking is either too little or too much action at the wrong time, and whether this happens because or in spite of agency – or agency – is neither here nor there.

And without getting all metaphysical about it, for something to develop to its full potential – or even move in that direction – there has to be something solid in place before that happens.

George Smiley’s wife was perennially unfaithful to him, and whether he had run her as an agent rather than been a rather ineffective – if affectionate – husband is besides the point: he didn’t because he was her husband. Brokers – even acting as agents only – need to act on their own behalf for a deal to develop and conclude; they are not simply passive receivers of instructions from on high. And human beings should, above all, remain human beings, whether they are shipowners, shipbrokers or the retired heads of the Special Intelligence Service, fictional or otherwise.

We are the authors of our own lives, and to create – and make sense of – the storyline we have to insert ourselves in it. It is the least – and the most – we can do.

Simon Ward