#362: Ahh, that was just bad luck

Is this an April Fools joke? Or was it just a bad decision?

We’ve all said it in the pas. That was just bad luck. A decision or strategy that should have worked, except this one piece of bad luck, derailed the entire project. Sure, there are things you can’t account for in decision-making and external factors that you may be unable to control. However, it wasn’t luck that caused it to fail; it was the plan itself.

Let’s look at factors that are attributed to bad luck:

Unforeseen Circumstances:

Sure, a natural disaster could occur, a major market shift that creates a significant hurdle, or a technological advance that eliminates the need for your service are all great examples of bad luck. However, if your project failed for any other reason, you didn’t look hard enough to prepare for those events.

Chapter One of my book PROFITS, Your Seven Letters for Success, discusses proper planning. You should be able to identify any problem in advance that could jeopardize your plan. Once identified, you weigh the risks and, if possible, plan for those contingencies.

Timing:

Timing plays a crucial role in decision-making. Sometimes, decisions may seem right, but external factors change shortly afterward, making them appear wrong in hindsight.

Why not pull the plug before you let something fail because of timing? Many of us get so invested in the idea that we don’t want to lose what we have put in. So, we roll the dice, hoping that the project works out. That mindset forces me to write what I have written many times in the past:

Hope is not a strategy, and sunk costs should never drive an action plan.

Part of your initial plan should be monitoring external factors. Any project has go-and-no-go points, and you need to identify them in advance. Again, proper planning prevents poor performance!

Limited Information:

This may have been a great excuse before the technological revolution. However, it can’t be used today. Whatever information you need to decide is readily available and a few keystrokes away. When I hear, “but I didn’t know,” I interpret this as “I didn’t look hard enough.”

Confirmation Bias:

This is one of today’s most dangerous reasons for failure. Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias in which individuals search for, interpret, favor, and remember information confirming their preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

If we only review sources of information that reinforce our ideas, we risk falling into the echo chamber. I wrote about this indirectly in my blog a few weeks ago: #360: You can’t handle the truth. So many significant decisions today are being made solely with one point of view as a reference. When the other side speaks, they are dismissed, and their ideas are considered wrong, no matter what.

Recent and potential examples of bad luck:

• It was just bad luck that an illegal alien murdered a 22-year-old jogger in Georgia.

• It was terrible luck that inflation soared to over 9.1% after we spent trillions of dollars we didn’t have or didn’t need to.

• It will be bad luck if a candidate dies in office, even though they were years beyond their life expectancy when they ran for office.

• It was bad luck that a virus escaped a poorly operated research facility.

I know that these are political examples, but these are the ones on the front pages. Unintended consequences are not an excuse.

Our own bad luck

Unfortunately, we don’t critique the decision-making process; we chalk it up to bad luck. Look around you and see what bad luck has caused your organization. Then, try to assign one of the above reasons to it. Have you completed an after-action report on this project? Did you dissect and identify what the root cause of the failure was? Or did you or your management team blame luck?

If bad luck is the reason your decisions went wrong, I’m sure good luck is the only reason you succeeded, right? Before you go, please look at some successful projects from your company or group. How many of them succeeded only because of good luck? I’m sure luck had nothing to do with those decisions.

If you need someone to poke holes and help you identify weak points in your strategy, contact us at the Kole Performance Group. It’s hard work today, but it will lead to a better tomorrow.

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I would love to hear an example of a project that went bad because of bad luck.

Feel free to comment!