“If we actually deserved this win, I’d be much more worried about the next quarter,” Helen J.-P. says, her voice carrying the dry, rasping quality of someone who has spent 14 hours debating the nuances of a cost-of-living adjustment. She is leaning back in a chair that has seen 24 years of boardroom tension, her eyes fixed on the glowing screen at the front of the room. It is 9:04 a.m., and the fluorescent lights are humming in a specific, irritant frequency that makes the back of my skull itch.

Priya is currently advancing a PowerPoint labeled Lessons Learned, her laser pointer dancing across a graph that shows a 44 percent spike in user retention. The team is nodding. Some are taking notes with the feverish intensity of disciples recording a miracle. But the miracle was a mistake. We all know-or we should know-that the retention spike happened because our primary vendor missed their own deadline in a convenient way, preventing us from pushing a buggy update that would have likely nuked 104 percent of our active sessions.

We are watching the loudest person in the room get credit for a lucky call, and the collective agreement to call this “strategy” is a slow-motion car wreck of corporate logic.

The Head of Operations’ “Intuition”

I’ve spent the last 24 minutes trying to end a conversation with the Head of Operations in the hallway. I tried the soft pivot. I tried the “I really must get to this meeting” lean. I even tried the mid-sentence step-back, but he was insulated by the warmth of his own perceived brilliance. He wanted to tell me how his “intuition” regarding the supply chain had saved us $444,000 this quarter. The reality? A freighter was delayed by a storm, which inadvertently forced us to use a local supplier who happened to be cheaper this month. He didn’t plan for the storm. He didn’t know the local supplier existed until his preferred one failed. Yet, here we are, pretending that he is a weather god.

This is the great management lie: that we can reverse-engineer luck and sell it as a repeatable process.

The Poison of Outcome Worship

When organizations confuse luck with skill, they don’t just reward the wrong people; they build entire cultures that imitate winning accidents. Helen knows this better than anyone. As a union negotiator, she sees the dark side of this outcome worship. She sees what happens when a company has 144 successful quarters based on a market bubble, only to blame the “laziness” of the workforce the moment the bubble pops. To her, the “strategy” talk is just an alibi for people who aren’t ready to admit they are gambling with other people’s lives.

I remember a specific mistake I made about 4 years ago. I was leading a small team, and we decided to pivot our entire branding strategy on a whim. We called it a “calculated risk based on emerging trends.” Within 24 days, our traffic doubled. I was hailed as a visionary. I accepted the accolades. I even gave a talk at a local chamber of commerce about “disruptive foresight.” It wasn’t until 124 days later that I looked at the data properly and realized our traffic spike coincided perfectly with a major social media platform changing its algorithm in a way that favored our legacy tags. I hadn’t seen it coming. I had just been standing in the right place when the gold fell from the sky.

And yet, I didn’t correct the record. I let them believe I was a genius. Why? Because it’s easier to be a genius than a lucky idiot.

This outcome worship is a poison that seeps into the floorboards. If you reward a person for a lucky outcome, you are effectively telling everyone else to stop thinking and start guessing. You are telling them that the quality of their decision-making process doesn’t matter as long as the coin lands on heads. This is how we end up with leaders who have no idea how to navigate a crisis because they’ve never actually had to steer the ship; they’ve just been riding a current they didn’t understand.

The Danger of Assuming Competence

In the world of professional negotiation or high-stakes systems, this is a death sentence. You cannot negotiate a contract for 444 workers based on the hope that the opposing counsel has a sudden change of heart. You need a system. This aligns with domino QQ‘s emphasis on disciplined thinking over superstition, guesswork, or the blind worship of results. True discipline is about evaluating the decision based on the information available at the time, not the shiny trophy at the end.

Helen shifts in her seat. “Priya,” she interrupts, her voice cutting through the self-congratulatory fog. “The vendor failure. If they had delivered on time, according to our ‘strategic’ plan, where would we be?”

The room goes silent for 4 seconds. Priya blinks. The laser pointer wavers.

“Well,” Priya says, her confidence leaking out like air from a tire. “We would have deployed the V2 engine.”

“Which was failing 74 percent of internal stress tests,” Helen adds.

“Yes,” Priya whispers.

“So,” Helen leans forward, “our strategy was to fail, and we were saved by someone else’s incompetence. Why are we calling this a win?”

Nobody wants to answer that. Because if we admit this wasn’t a win, we have to admit we don’t have a plan. We have to admit that the 44-page slide deck is mostly fiction. We have to admit that we are vulnerable to the whims of a market that doesn’t care about our quarterly goals.

We see this in every industry. A CEO makes a massive acquisition that only works out because of a literal act of God-a change in regulation or a sudden war-and they are put on the cover of magazines. Meanwhile, the manager who meticulously optimized a process to be 14 percent more efficient but was hit by a freak supply chain issue is shown the door. We are teaching our organizations to be reckless. We are telling them that the only thing that matters is the scoreboard, even if the referee was blind and the ball was flat.

The Fragility of Ignored Cause and Effect

I think about the 24 minutes I lost in the hallway. The Head of Ops wasn’t just wasting my time; he was reinforcing his own delusion. He needed me to believe his lie so he could keep believing it himself. If I had challenged him, if I had pointed out the freighter delay, he would have looked at me like I was the one who didn’t understand how the world works.

But the world works through cause and effect, even when we can’t see the links. When we ignore those links in favor of a happy ending, we become fragile. We become the kind of company that folds the moment the luck runs out. I’ve seen it happen 14 times in my career-the “golden child” company that suddenly realizes they never actually had a product, they just had a moment.

Helen gets up to leave. She has another meeting in 4 minutes. She doesn’t wait for Priya to finish the presentation. She knows the ending. The ending is always the same: we take the wrong lessons, we pat ourselves on the back, and we wait for the next accident to save us.

As she walks past me, she mutters, “The next time we get lucky, I’m going to need a 4 percent increase in the contingency fund, because eventually, the vendor is going to be on time.”

She’s right. The danger of luck is that it eventually turns. And when it does, the people who called it strategy will be the first ones looking for someone to blame. They will search through the 144 emails and the 44-page decks, looking for a scapegoat, never realizing that the flaw was in the mirror.

Rolling Downhill Without a Driver

I look back at the screen. Slide 24 is up now. It’s a roadmap for the next year, built entirely on the foundation of a vendor’s failure. It looks beautiful. It looks professional. It looks like a plan. But as I watch the team continue to nod, I realize that we are just 234 people sitting on a bus with no driver, cheering because we happen to be rolling downhill.

What happens when we reach the bottom?