Innovators are agents of change. They pursue novelty, often in the face of adversity. To succeed, they need to consider the other agents they are surrounded by. And they must embrace their own agency in all its facets in order to maximise the impact they have.
Tag: change
The agent’s means
If you imagine an agent as a blackbox, you can first focus on the inputs it can receive and the outputs it can produce. In a second step, you then peek under the hood to understand what happens inside that box, how the inputs are connected to the outputs. Let us begin with the agent’s relations to the outside: What goes in? What comes out?
The agent’s purpose
While agency is necessarily agnostic of any purpose, the agent itself cannot exist without a motivation, a mission, an objective, a goal, in order to orient its actions in a meaningful direction. The very essence of 'meaning' solely depends on the presence of a purpose from which the agent can derive the most appropriate next step.
The agent’s context
Agency can only exist within a given context, and the same applies to agents themselves. These concrete environments or abstract situations can take many different forms, that are introduced here.
Defining agency
With the 'target list' of natural and artificial agents in mind, and focusing on their common characteristics, I can now propose a working definition of agency. At its core, agency is the ability to act. And that action has certain qualities: it serves some purpose, it has a direction towards some utility. Today, I'll offer a short defining phrase and then unpack its meaning piece by piece.
understanding innovation 