Why Humans Keep Creating ‘Lucky’ Things
Luck, in essence, is a story woven around randomness. People dislike the idea that outcomes might be indifferent to effort. When a team has a success—whether it’s closing a deal or finally taming an unruly quarterly report—anything nearby at the time can be subtly elevated into a talisman. A pen. A particular spreadsheet. A way of phrasing performance targets. These items become tokens of control in an otherwise unpredictable environment.This isn’t foolishness; it’s a psychological buffer. The workplace is full of uncertainty. Metrics shift. Markets sway. Software updates destroy carefully curated workflows. In response, the mind performs a small protective magic trick. It insists that stability can be found in the concrete: this template, this chair, this routine, this order of agenda items. Whether or not it’s true is beside the point. The feeling of control is the real treasure.
How Teams Reinforce These Beliefs
Teams build shared myths faster than they agree on lunch. If a process “worked once,” it is often treated as inherently superior. Familiarity gets mistaken for reliability. A spreadsheet that has survived five product cycles becomes regarded as battle-tested—never mind whether it actually contains relevant logic anymore. The fear of touching “lucky” systems can be strong. No one wants to be the person who presses Enter and discovers that the treasured forecasting sheet has been held together solely by duct tape and hope.This dynamic creates inertia. Innovation becomes tangled with superstition. Change is avoided not because it’s unwise, but because it threatens the myth of certainty.
Recognizing When Luck is Masquerading as Strategy
A manager can spot superstition-driven decision-making by watching for oddly emotional attachments to non-critical artifacts. If a tool, workflow, or KPI is defended with unusually passionate fervor—but with minimal clear reasoning—luck may be playing a secret role.- If no one remembers why a system exists, but everyone agrees it must not be changed, superstition may be at work.
- If conversations include phrases like “It just works” followed by no elaboration, caution is appropriate.
- If someone jokes that an object is “lucky” and everyone nods a little too seriously, an investigation is overdue.
Reducing the Grip of the ‘Lucky’ Workflow
Breaking superstition doesn’t require a dramatic intervention. The goal is to replace emotional comfort with informed confidence. Instead of declaring, “We must abandon this spreadsheet, for it is cursed,” a more effective approach is to introduce a structured review process. The idea is to move the team from myth to transparency, without provoking panic.One approach is to schedule short, regular audits of tools and workflows. These are not inquisitions—they’re friendly health checks. The audit asks basic questions: Does this system reflect current needs? Is anyone afraid to modify it? Are we documenting how decisions are made, or are we trusting institutional memory, which is about as reliable as a taxi receipt after rain?
Another useful tactic is to encourage multiple people to interact with the same tool. When only one person knows how something works, the mystery around it grows. Mystery breeds superstition. But if several people understand the system, the team begins to view it as a shared resource rather than a mystical relic.
Building Decision-Making Rituals That Are Actually Useful
Ritual isn’t the enemy. Humans need structure. The key is to construct rituals that support clarity instead of myth-making. For example, a team might use the same decision framework for evaluating options: define the objective, evaluate constraints, examine alternative scenarios, and explicitly state assumptions. This doesn’t sound thrilling, but it creates a cognitive safety net more robust than any lucky pen.To make this feel less like homework, decision rituals can be anchored in playful elements. Not the forced fun variety—nothing involving mandatory cheering or themed hats. Instead, simple shared signals that indicate, “We are entering decision mode now.” A specific opening question. A consistent order of speaking. A short pause before final agreement. These small, reliable structures help remove emotional noise and personal bias without removing humanity from the discussion.
Rolling the Dice on Meaning
Teams will always create stories. It’s how people make sense of chance, pressure, and the faint absurdity of corporate life. The point isn’t to suppress these stories, but to understand them. When a “lucky” object appears, it’s usually a signal—not of irrationality, but of a group’s desire for reassurance. By acknowledging that desire openly, teams can shift from relying on superstition to building confidence through shared knowledge.There’s nothing wrong with affection for a beloved spreadsheet or a well-worn meeting ritual, as long as no one believes the object itself controls outcomes. Luck, when examined, turns out to be a placeholder for comfort in uncertainty. And comfort can be redesigned, redistributed, and reinforced in ways that don’t rely on charms.
True skill in decision-making comes from recognizing randomness without surrendering to it. A team that can laugh at its lucky habits, examine their roots, and still choose clarity over superstition has already made a sophisticated organizational leap.
Fortune Favors the Well-Documented
If fortune ever did favor the bold, it has since updated its preferences. It now favors teams who can explain why they chose what they chose, who can improve their systems without fearing that a spreadsheet deity will retaliate, and who understand that meaning is something humans bring to objects—not the other way around.After all, the dice never cared who rolled them. But the people always do.
Article kindly provided by diceemporium.com