Today is Day 1 of our new “Intelligent Agency on Multiple Scales” project! This is funded under the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Diverse Intelligences scheme, and the project will examine ways in which concepts of agency depend on scale. For the next two years, we’ll be examining the different roles that agency plays in explaining behaviour from the very small scales of sub-cellular and uni-cellular processes to the very large scales of collective action in flocks, swarms and schools. Rather than assuming that agency must be understood in human terms, the goal is to see how we might understand agency in ways that are appropriate to much less complex systems. Doing that allows us to appreciate the diversity of agency, and also to see how those simpler systems could be useful models for investigating problems involving humans and other complex agents.