Questions for you:
- When something goes wrong at work, what is your first instinct: to find a causal explanation, to find someone to blame, or to accept that some outcomes are genuinely random?
- Do you or your organisation have any equivalent of lucky charms or ritual behaviours, ways of managing uncertainty that are not really about probability?
- How much of what your organisation calls risk management is genuinely analytical, and how much is closer to the Greek model of performing actions that create a feeling of control over outcomes that are not actually controllable?
Organisational applications:
The persistence of non-rational uncertainty management in modern organisations: The story’s closing point, that astrology apps and lucky charms are modern versions of the Greek impulse to make meaning from uncertainty rather than calculate it, applies directly to many common organisational practices.
Detailed long-range financial forecasts presented with false precision, strategy documents that project confident narratives over inherently unknowable futures, and post-hoc attribution of success to leadership decisions that were largely determined by market conditions all serve a similar psychological function: they create a sense of agency and control over outcomes that are substantially random. Recognising this is not an argument for abandoning planning, but for being more honest about which parts of organisational activity are genuine analysis and which are rituals designed to manage anxiety about uncertainty.
Accountability frameworks and the attribution of blame: The Greek model treated bad outcomes as evidence of divine displeasure, which had the practical consequence of always producing a causal story, someone had offended the gods, even when no human action was responsible for the outcome. Modern organisations have a parallel tendency: when things go wrong, someone is usually found to be at fault, even in genuinely random systems.
This is partly because accountability frameworks are designed around the assumption that outcomes reflect decisions. In high-variance domains where randomness plays a substantial role, systematic bad luck will be attributed to bad management and good luck to good strategy. This produces distorted performance assessments, discourages honest risk-taking, and directs remediation efforts towards human behaviour when the real issue is the underlying variance in the system. Building explicit acknowledgement of irreducible randomness into how organisations account for outcomes is uncomfortable but more accurate than the default.
Superstition as organisational signal: The story notes that the Greeks were not stupid; they simply lacked the conceptual tools to do otherwise. The same charity should be extended to modern organisational superstitions. When a team consistently does something that has no rational connection to outcomes, insisting on particular meeting formats, attributing success to a specific individual’s presence, or treating certain processes as talismanic, this often reflects a genuine and reasonable attempt to manage felt uncertainty in the absence of better tools.
Rather than dismissing these practices, the more useful response is to ask what uncertainty they address and whether there are more effective ways to address it. The superstition is frequently a symptom of a gap in genuine understanding of what actually drives outcomes.
Further reading
On the history of probability and the shift from divine to mathematical explanations:
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein. The most readable account of how Western thinking moved from divine attribution of uncertain outcomes to mathematical probability, covering the key figures from Cardano through Pascal and Fermat to modern risk theory.
The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern by Keith Devlin. A focused account of the specific intellectual moment when probability theory emerged, with clear explanation of why the conceptual shift from divine will to calculable odds was so consequential.
On the persistence of non-rational thinking about chance:
The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman. Wiseman’s research on how people’s beliefs about luck shape their behaviour, and how those behaviours in turn affect their outcomes, is directly relevant to the story’s observation that modern lucky-charm thinking is not simply irrational.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies by Michael Shermer. Shermer’s account of why meaning-making is a prior cognitive operation to rational analysis explains why the Greek model persists in modern forms, and why it is so difficult to dislodge even when people have access to better tools.
On risk, accountability, and organisational responses to uncertainty:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb’s argument that organisations systematically underestimate the role of chance in outcomes, and construct post-hoc narratives that attribute random events to skill or strategy, connects directly to the accountability problem the story raises.
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke. Duke’s account of how to separate decision quality from outcome quality is a practical framework for building organisational accountability systems that do not default to the Greek model of treating bad outcomes as evidence of bad decisions.
About the image
I don’t think this is a God. But some sort of important person whose statue was being protected under plastic sheeting when I saw it in Rome a few years ago. There was something rather creepy about the way he looked.
Photo montage and photo by Matt Ballantine, 2026
Random the Book 