Questions for you:
- When I accomplish something, do I appreciate its uniqueness even if it seems mundane or unremarkable?
- How often do I dismiss experiences as “ordinary” when they’re actually statistically singular?
- Do I conflate “unique” with “valuable” – can I recognise that something unprecedented might still be unremarkable?
Questions for your organisation:
- Are we so focused on dramatic, visible outcomes that we overlook the genuine novelty in everyday work?
- How do we celebrate or acknowledge the unique combinations of skills, timing, and circumstance that produce our results?
- Do we mistake repeatability for lack of value, when even routine processes create unrepeatable moments?
Further reading
We first learned about this remarkable fact from the work of UK Statistician David Spiegelhalter and his book The Art of Uncertainty.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458199/the-art-of-uncertainty-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241658628
How many times must you shuffle a deck of cards? Brad Mann’s paper gets deep into the mathematical detail of how much shuffling is enough (spoiler alert: seven riffle shuffles).
https://chance.dartmouth.edu/teaching_aids/books_articles/Mann.pdf
Persi Diaconis. One of the leading experts in the mathematics of card shuffling, Persi Diaconis has a fascinating backstory: a professional magician, a gambler, and then a Harvard Math Graduate who consulted for casinos to identify problems with their card-shuffling machines.
https://statistics.stanford.edu/people/persi-diaconis
There are a surprisingly large number of ways of shuffling a deck of cards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling
About the image
The original version was a fairly dull stock image of a hand holding a fan of cards in front of a satellite view of the Earth. This reworking was a “five in the morning” moment of inspiration: I laid out some of a pack of cards on my dining table, and took a photo. I then used a map of the world to cut out the image in Photoshop.
Photo montage and photo by Matt Ballantine, 2026
Random the Book 