High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter
Hire for two traits only — people who see a problem and go, and people who go now.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 94%
Asked what lets OpenAI ship faster than Apple or NASA, Kilpatrick collapses the answer to two hiring traits: high agency and working with urgency. High agency means acting on a customer problem without assembling consensus from seven departments. Urgency means compressing the time between seeing the problem and shipping the solution. He argues this pair, more than process, is what keeps a fast company fast as it scales.
Origin
Logan Kilpatrick on Lenny's Podcast (Feb 2024), describing OpenAI's culture. He attributes the underlying formulation to a Sam Altman tweet from around 2022 about high agency and urgency.
Core principles
- 01Older institutions accrete checks and balances that drag speed down; the traits, not the process, are the counterweight.
- 02High agency = hearing a customer problem and already pushing on the solution, without waiting for permission.
- 03Trust is the enabling condition — you can skip consensus only if you trust the person's judgment.
- 04The bottom-up, self-organised team beats the top-down assignment for speed.
- 05Hiring incredibly smart people is table stakes; agency and urgency are the differentiators.
How to run it
- 1
Define the two traits in observable behaviour, not adjectives
High agency: the candidate has, unprompted, identified a problem and driven a solution without being assigned it. Urgency: they compressed the timeline rather than waiting for the next planning cycle.
Pro tip Probe for the moment they decided not to wait — and who, if anyone, they had to route around.
- 2
Screen for the anti-pattern: consensus-seeking
Listen for candidates who describe getting sign-off from many departments as the substance of their work. Kilpatrick names this as exactly what traditional companies get stuck behind.
Watch out Do not confuse collaboration with consensus-seeking. The trait you're rejecting is needing 50 people's agreement before acting.
- 3
Use a strong-belief question to surface conviction
Kilpatrick's own favourite interview question: what do you believe strongly that most people disagree with you about? He isn't grading whether he agrees — he's watching whether they hold and can defend a deeply-held belief.
Pro tip The signal is in the why, not the what. Someone with no such belief likely lacks the conviction that agency requires.
- 4
Build the trust conditions that let agency function
Agency only converts into speed if leadership genuinely trusts people to act alone. Pair the hiring filter with a culture of transparency and instant cross-team communication so people can self-organise.
Pro tip OpenAI's mechanism is Slack-heavy real-time communication — Kilpatrick says it is often faster to Slack someone than to walk to their desk, which lets cross-functional teams form on the spot.
Watch out Hiring high-agency people into a permission-gated culture wastes the trait and drives them out.
In the wild
Developers kept giving feedback that they wanted a higher level of abstraction on top of the existing APIs. No executive assigned the project. A group of people on the team came together, put a plan together, and quickly built the API that now powers a large number of assistant applications.
→ A major DevDay launch that originated bottom-up from customer feedback rather than top-down roadmap assignment.
After the Thanksgiving weekend where the board fired and rehired Sam Altman, Kilpatrick flew to San Francisco expecting chaos. He walked into the office on Monday morning to find people laser-focused and back at work. He argues many companies would have been derailed for a non-trivial period.
→ The same agency trait that produces speed also produced resilience — the team self-directed back to the mission without instruction.
Common mistakes
Optimising process instead of people
Speed problems get treated as workflow problems. Kilpatrick's claim is that if you distil it down, the two traits are the most important thing — process is downstream.
Adding checks and balances by default as you scale
Kilpatrick names this as the tendency of older institutions like Apple and NASA: institutional legacy barriers accumulate and drag everything down.
Treating raw intelligence as sufficient
He calls hiring incredibly smart people an unsaid given. Smart plus low agency still produces a slow company.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and hiring managers at fast-scaling companies trying to protect shipping velocity as headcount grows
Not ideal for
Highly-regulated or safety-critical environments where the checks and balances exist for legitimate reasons and unilateral action is genuinely dangerous
From the transcript
“finding people who are high agency and work with urgency”
“I see this in folks that I work with like folks are so high agency like they see a problem and they go and tackle…”
“I'm I'm always curious to hear what people's like the thing that they so strongly believe that uh people disagree with them on”
From the episode
Inside OpenAI
Logan Kilpatrick (head of developer relations)