Designing for luck

I think we underacknowledge how much luck shapes outcomes.

We tell stories about success as if they were inevitable — the right idea, the right person, the right execution. But when I look honestly at the things that have gone well in my own work, timing had more to do with it than I'd like to admit. A budget window opened. A leader happened to be asking the right question. A crisis made people suddenly receptive to something that had been sitting on the shelf.

The uncomfortable corollary is that I've also done work I'm proud of that went nowhere. Not because it was flawed, but because the conditions weren't there. The idea was sound. Nobody was ready for it.

So I've started thinking less about whether an idea is good and more about whether the prerequisites are in place. Does the problem have a felt urgency right now? Is there someone in a position to say yes? Is the organisation actually capable of absorbing this, today, with the resources it has? If the answer to any of those is no, the idea isn't wrong — it's just early.

The practical upshot is that I've learned to keep things simple. Not because simple is always better, but because simple is what moves when the moment arrives. A lean idea can be adapted overnight. A sprawling one needs a committee. And windows don't wait for committees.

None of this is a formula. I still get the timing wrong. But I've stopped treating luck as noise and started treating it as something I can at least partially design around — by staying ready, staying simple, and paying attention to when conditions shift.