Agency over chance — How do you marry luck, skill and randomness?

For non-English natives such as myself, I find that words take on meanings I had not understood earlier. Agency is such a word. I became fascinated by the word agency. It is defined roughly as follows: “Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behaviour, or purposeful, goal-directed activity. An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing.”

Whether we are building businesses or making investments, skill is important, however, luck and randomness play a major role in the outcome of our actions. Understanding where we have agency and where we do not is critical for our results. It is critical for how we perceive life around us.

As an example, every day we are subject to the incompleteness and randomness of radio wave propagation. Daily, we experience a blurry video, a dropped Zoom call, or a garbled voice on the phone. We have exerted a certain but incomplete agency over radio communications. Radio is by no means perfect. After all, it is subject to chance and randomness.

When I studied radio wave propagation and designed algorithms, the philosophy was predicated on radio propagation as a random complex system. You can’t…