@freakazoid I sort of treat those as agency issues, personally, because they tend to indirectly result *from* a lack of agency.

In a healthy organization, the amount of power that someone has over something, corresponds with the amount of responsibility they have over it. That's ultimately what agency is about in a project context, IMO.

But in the examples you mention, there is an (implicit) responsibility of keeping the thing running, because you will definitely be blamed if it fails, but no corresponding power to actually do so in the best way (eg. refactoring the code). Instead the priorities are set by someone else, who ultimately isn't the responsible party despite what the org chart says.

Likewise, peer feedback needs a healthy balance of power and responsibility; in this case it sounds like the power was functionally with senior folks, but the responsibility was passed off to others (by eg. punishing them in peer review).

I think something similar applies to a lot of workplace issues, where they derive - directly or indirectly, sometimes across multiple steps - from what is fundamentally a problem of agency.