Fortune’s Fools. How better decisions make you un-lucky.

Fortune’s Fools.
How better decisions make you un-lucky.

Time to read: 8 minutes.

Ours is a tale of woe and wisdom, and in the telling I hope you will decide that being “un” lucky may be among the most fortunate of outcomes. We’re all fools of Fortuna, seduced by the goddess of luck, and subject to her whim; but it’s high time we loaded the devotional dice towards wisdom.

In living, we wager our futures in a high stakes game that’s always been beyond our control. Each day we are thrown “all-in” to our individual lives, we strive, plan and prospect for our uncertain futures, all the while knowing that our fortunes are hostage to a range of infinitely complex forces beyond our control or comprehension.

The question isn’t so much why we continue to endure; risking everything day after day in our “winner takes all” game of life, it’s more that we ought to be asking why we are such willing allies of luck and chance, when wisdom always holds a better hand.

How many of us factor “luck” into our planning and decision making, or for that matter even have a view on how luck, for good or ill, fits into our perceptual scheme at all? Luck is a uniquely human imposition on the world, our beliefs, language and history are woven through with our reliance on Chance, Fate and Fortune as a way of coming to terms with the limitations of our predictive and controlling reach.

Our experience of the world has always been empirical, we are compulsive story tellers who craft narratives filled with over-simplified reasoning to bridge “outcome gaps”, impelled to attribute cause to effect, in part at least, because our success in the world hinges on our making sense of it.

Few of us today would rely on a prayer to lady luck to tilt matters in our favour, we’re much more likely to stake a claim to self-determination, in that our actions and decisions drive outcomes, or that we “make” our own luck – whatever that really means.

Luck, or chance, as we conceive it, has always been a great disruptor of human affairs. It remains a pervasive property of life for good or ill, and we continue to try and tame or contain it to this day within another belief system – probability theory. But are we, or can we become, wiser as individuals as a consequence of the new ruling orthodoxy of science?

For the French philosopher Voltaire (see quote above), who made his life’s fortune by winning the state lottery several times, he found that his good-luck was in the small print, unfortunately for the designer of the lottery, his bad-luck rested there also¹. The outcome wasn’t so much a question of chance, but more of Fate, and the resulting fortunes of both men diverged as a consequence.

Voltaire and a mathematician friend used a new science of the day, the “calculus of chance”, to determine that the structure of the lottery allowed for chance to be almost entirely excluded, and in doing so they tipped the scales in favour of expectation – the nemesis of all forms of luck, good and bad.

Almost every judgement, decision and action we undertake is a prediction of a beneficial outcome that we believe has a higher value than the alternatives available to us; and if we are sufficiently convinced of the reasoning behind our predictions, we develop reasonable expectations.

We talk of the “weight of expectation“ for good reason, we perceive it as a measure of the burden we “feel” able to carry, the greater the expectation placed upon us, the more we strain to support it. However, expectation also has value, both within probability theory and to us as individuals, and in decision making we measure value in terms of worth not weight.

How we judge, or weigh, alternatives in making decisions is concerned with comparing values; in evaluating alternative courses of action we develop a range of expectations, outcomes, and commitments to them. Value, or worth, is a tricky topic which I will deal with more fully in another article, but for now, I’d ask that you accept that we construct our expectations in terms of their attributes and usefulness to us in a multitude of ways.

Voltaire had sufficient reason to develop a profoundly strong expectation of being able to repeatedly claim his winnings in the name of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. He secured victory over chance by removing almost all the possible influences of luck, good or bad. His innovation led to his horizon of expectation becoming so all-encompassing that the disruptions of luck could not prevail.

Most of us go through life squeezed between hope and apprehension, a tension that tempts us to see our own case as an exception, and in turn perhaps deserving of the benefits of good fortune. Luck, if it has an operating principle, adheres to one of utter indifference to human affairs, but we persist and “push our luck” in the delusion that fortune will favour us, while in truth, as long as chance holds sway in our decision making, we will forever remain Fortune’s Fools.

There are few of us who could, like Voltaire, lay a claim to “make” our own un-luck, but if we harbour the desire to improve our decision making, and wish to narrow the gap between our expectations and outcomes – the un-luckier we are, the better our decisions will be. We can’t control luck, good or bad, but we can limit the risk of our exposure to it interfering with our plans and determining outcomes.

Even Voltaire, however, couldn’t make his scheme work without others, he made a decision to syndicate his expectation of winning in order to secure his desired outcome. Without the involvement of others too much would have been left to luck, and as a consequence the outcome expectation would have suffered considerably, and his project would likely have collapsed into failure.

Good decision making is a capacity already within us, an evolutionary capability that we all possess, enabling us to survive and more recently thrive, in an infinitely complex world filled with uncertainty. These worldmaking tools and skills require sharpening by familiarity and practice, but when we apply them to their potential, as individuals or in groups, we have the possibility and power to share far more than an expectation of an improved future, we can choose to build it – but first we have to decide.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next; Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

1: Voltaire Almighty: A life in Pursuit of Freedom, by Roger Pearson