Is Luck Random — or Can You Cultivate It? | Christian Busch | TED

On January 7, 2025, our house, my wife's parents' house and most of our neighborhood burned down to the ground.

On that day, I was about to submit a paper to a major management conference, and like a rookie, I had left it to the last hour and was stuck in the uploading queue.

That's when the evacuation order came in for the LA wildfires in Pacific Palisades, where we lived.

I found myself outside hosing down the house with one hand and holding the laptop with the other, desperately trying to get that document to upload.

At that point, I thought that was my biggest problem.

Turns out it wasn't.

The document did upload.

The hosing, however, did not work, and 24 hours later, our house was gone.

I'll never forget the firefighting planes flying so low overhead as we evacuated.

It felt like a really bad Hollywood movie.

My wife was pumping breast milk as we were trying to get our newborn to safety and our toddler from preschool.

That night in the hotel, as we tried to act as normal as possible towards the kids, my then-three-year-old daughter looked up and said, "I want to go home."

You know, I've researched, taught and worked on the unexpected for over a decade, and I've seen a fair share of unexpected events myself.

But this hit on a whole new level.

In the days that followed, I tried to focus on the things that I could control.

And surprisingly, there were micro-moments of joy, like unexpectedly bumping into old friends in the hotel that we evacuated to.

And that experience was an unexpected and certainly not wished-for opportunity to practice the very serendipity mindset framework that I had been working on, and that can help us navigate those kinds of situations.

More on that later.

But first, let's talk about bad luck.

It all felt like really bad luck.

But when I reflected on it, I realized it was more than that.

It was zemblanity.

Zemblanity is when something unlucky, unwanted or undesired happens by design because it's already built in.

It seems unexpected and like bad luck, but in hindsight it was to be expected and avoidable.

In our case, the wildfires and the winds were the trigger, but the real misfortune was already built into the fragile system all around us.

There was a lack of water in the water reservoirs and hydrants, a limited pre-deployment of fire trucks in the area despite the early warnings.

Brush wasn’t cleared in the area, and a complete lack of coordination.

It wasn't just one thing.

In retrospect, we realized that it was a space of infinite negative possibilities where eventually misfortune was inevitable.

The thing is, even when you try to do the right thing, in the system around you, zemblanity can still be baked in and you get caught up in it.

What happened to us wasn't just bad luck.

It was a pattern that I've seen everywhere, from wildfires to boardrooms to living rooms.

The thing about zemblanity is it’s not just out there in big systems, like in the wildfire case.

We see the same in companies with toxic corporate cultures, where it's just a matter of time that disaster strikes.

And sometimes even in our own minds.

Zemblanity is when we create our own bad luck.

Take the traveler who leaves for the airport with exactly the time it's needed to get to the airport.

Any small unexpected thing, like a minor traffic jam, and suddenly, the flight is missed.

Or take the old man who is told to use his walking stick.

He doesn't.

One day he "unexpectedly" falls down the stairs.

It might seem surprising in the moment, but it was to be expected.

Zemblanity seems like bad luck, but it's already built in all along.

Now before I go deeper into this, I want to ask you a question.

In the room, who of you considers yourself to be a lucky person, please raise your hands.

And at home, a mental hand-raise works too.

OK, quite the lucky room, actually, well done.

No worries, I won't ask the unlucky ones.

We'll focus on the lucky ones for now.

Those of you now who said you consider yourself to be a lucky person, who of you thinks they had some sort of role in it?

Please put all modesty aside.

Who thinks, hands up, had some sort of role in it?

OK, still quite a few.

Alright, so that's interesting, right, that on one hand, we know that luck is random, but on the other hand, already Louis Pasteur told us that it may favor the prepared mind.

In order to visualize this, let’s look at the Luck Matrix.

The Luck Matrix shows us the four different types of luck.

Here, on the lower left, we see bad luck.

Bad luck is something negative, unexpected, that happens to us.

It happens to us, you can never blame anyone for bad luck and it creates a lot of societal inequality.

Good luck, here on the lower right, is something positive.

It happens to us, we didn't work for it.

Just great if it happens.

Zemblanity is the misfortune by design that we built into fragile systems or into the pattern and habits that kind of then ultimately lead us to disaster.

And then the thing that has driven our research for the last decade is serendipity.

Serendipity is the active luck that depends on how we engage with the unexpected.

Blind luck happens to us, and active luck, serendipity, can be cultivated.

Imagine you have erratic hand movements like I do.

Then you spill a lot of coffee, right?

So imagine you accidentally spill coffee over the person next to you.

That person looks at you slightly annoyed, but you sense there might be something there.

You don't know what, you just think, oh, that could be an interesting person.

And now you have a couple of options, right?

One is to just say, "I'm so sorry."

You walk outside and you think, "Ah, what could have happened?"

Another option is you start that conversation and that person becomes the love of your life or your cofounder or you name it.

The point is, the eventual outcome, good or bad, depends on how we engage with the unexpected.

And that's where serendipity emerges.

Serendipity really is this unexpected good luck that results from unplanned moments in which our actions lead to positive outcomes.

Let's look at an example.

In 1968, Spencer Silver was trying to develop a stronger glue.

Accidentally, he developed a weaker one.

Seemed useless in the moment, until a couple of years later, his colleague Arthur Fry was using that weak glue to avoid having his bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal.

That seemed quite useful.

The Post-it note was born and became one of 3M's major products.

Lots of examples out there of serendipity, right?

From Velcro to microwave ovens to how people unexpectedly find love or their apartments.

And a lot of times also when crises become the inflection point for something in one's own life.

The point is that over the last decade we've studied serendipity, all these different stories of serendipity, and tried to understand, is there a pattern behind that.

And it turns out there is.

It's always the same process.

There is an unexpected serendipity trigger, which is random, right?

So the coffee spill or the weak glue.

But then we have to imbue meaning in it.

We have to connect the dots, we have to see what could be in that moment, and then we have to materialize it, right?

It's not enough to just think, "This could be the love of my life."

You've got to actually go on dates, right?

And so the point is, once we look at it as a process, we can influence it.

We can first learn how to see more serendipity triggers to try to focus on what is the information hidden in this good- or bad-luck moment.

You know, for example, asking in weekly meetings, what surprised you last week?

Very simple question, but then people start to focus on, is there some information in this, kind of, unexpected event that has just been happening here?

Second, we can learn how to "seed" more serendipity triggers.

And I'm not suggesting you spill more coffee.

There other ways, one of which is, at an event like this today, to put some rich information points out there, right?

When someone asks the dreaded “So what do you do?” question, saying something like, "Hey, I'm Christian Busch, I study serendipity, but what I'm really curious about is parenting, because our four-year-old just learned how to negotiate.” And so what I'm doing here is I'm giving you a couple of potential connection points where you could be like, "Oh my God, such a coincidence, our kid also -- X, Y, Z."

The point is, instead of having a pitch that's unidimensional, it's giving multidimensionality and potential dots that other people can connect for us.

Then third, we can learn how to better connect the dots.

For example, asking ourselves in unexpected moments, "Can I still find some meaning in this?"

And then last but not least, we can also learn how to act more on it because that's where we miss serendipity very often.

Think back in your life to moments where you saw an unexpected opportunity in the moment, but you didn't act on it, right?

So maybe it was the unexpected idea in a meeting that you didn't bring into the meeting.

Or you were flirting with a person on the bus when you were still single, of course, but you were flirting with that person on the bus, and you didn't speak with them.

And then you walked outside and think, "Ah, what could have happened had I?"

And there's a lot of reasons that hold us back in those moments, right?

But one of the major reasons is fear of rejection, right?

So in my case, for example, my brain immediately goes to what's the worst thing that can happen if I do this?

The sting of rejection.

One thing I've realized, though, and our research shows, is that actually, once you start to realize that that is not the real worst case, that the real worst case is the regret of not having tried.

That feeling of walking outside and thinking, "Ah, what could have happened?"

And so what can be really useful is this idea of reframing away from “What’s the risk of doing this?” to "What's actually the risk of not doing it?"

And then we realize, the risk of not doing it is a lot of times much higher than the risk of doing it.

So it gives us a bias for action.

Now why is this serendipity mindset, this capacity to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes so important?

Well because the unexpected is everywhere, whether we see it or not, and whether we like it or not, right?

The likelihood of one specific unexpected event happening is very low, right?

It’s very unlikely that the lady here yells at me or the gentleman here throws a peach at me, right?

That's very -- I hope that's unlikely.

I mean, you never know, but it's very unlikely in itself.

But when you add up all the possible unexpected things that could happen, all these infinite, unexpected things that could happen out there, it actually becomes quite likely that something unexpected happens.

And that's quite scary to me as a German, right?

We love planning, we love having a strategy and straight lines.

And then life is a little bit more like a squiggle, right?

Where unexpected events come from everywhere.

And so we have to build a muscle for that.

And that is true for good luck, but it's also true for bad luck, right?

The same alertness to our surroundings, the ability to connect our dots that helps us nurture serendipity, can also help us guard against the impacts of zemblanity.

And you know, of course, mindset is not a cure-all, right?

Our research also shows that things like education, networks, safety nets play a huge role when it comes to opportunity spaces.

But on the individual level, for what is at our disposal, mindset is one of the most effective tools we have to nurture serendipity and guard against zemblanity.

It's not toxic positivity.

It's not ignoring pain, it's not ignoring grief.

It’s accepting it, it’s working with it, and then saying, "What can I still control now?

What can I still focus on now?"

And, you know, in our case, there was a lot of pain around losing our house, right?

And that doesn't really go away that quickly.

I still wake up in the morning and think, how can that happen.

But alongside it, something unexpected happened.

It sparked new research.

It gave me a renewed sense of purpose, and it rallied the community around us.

I am far closer now with my in-laws, with whom we spend much more time.

And so out of the ashes, something new is beginning to grow.

Viktor Frankl, who has been a great inspiration to me, once said that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

And I believe that's very true.

We can't pick the fires, the storms, the crises, but we can choose how we meet them.

And that choice is where serendipity begins as the unexpected starting point for a new chapter and potentially a whole new book.

My hope is that we start building a world that is designing more for serendipity and guards against zemblanity.

And the next time something unexpected happens to you, may serendipity be with you.

Thank you.

(Applause)