An investigation into luck — and whether it can be engineered.
Luck touches nearly every outcome that matters. And yet, for a force this important, it is surprisingly understudied. The serious work that does exist has barely reached public discourse. It is not taught, not part of how most people think about their careers or decisions. The thinkers who study it deserve a wider audience, and the rest of us could use what they've found.Fortune Engineering is an attempt to change that. Not by claiming to have the answers, but by following the evidence across disciplinary lines (philosophy, psychology, complexity science, business strategy) and seeing whether a synthesis is possible. One that a general audience can use to make better decisions about risk, opportunity, and the forces they don't fully control.
A long-form, interview-driven investigation in the style of a documentary series. Built around one question: can luck be learned, or at least managed?Episodes are based on one-on-one conversations with leading thinkers: philosophers alongside complexity scientists alongside business strategists. Each conversation puts a thinker's work in dialogue with ideas from outside their own discipline, and shapes the questions brought to the next. The point is to let the people who have done the work explain it in their own words, and respond to how thinkers in other fields approach the same questions.The format: not an academic interrogating a peer, not a journalist after a headline. A serious amateur who has spent a decade reading the work, asking the questions that don't always get asked within a single discipline. And carrying the answers across disciplinary boundaries.Where this leads will emerge from the conversations. It seems only appropriate, for an investigation into luck, to leave room for a little serendipity.
I have been lucky more often than effort alone can explain. I have produced a feature film that sold to eleven countries, spent three years as a professional options trader, built a software company, and founded a coworking space. In each one, I watched skill, timing, and circumstance produce wildly different outcomes. Luck was always doing real work.That recognition turned into an obsession. Not with luck as superstition or self-help, but as a serious intellectual problem that touches everything and is understood by almost nobody outside the specialists who study it. Other people brought novels on holiday. I brought Gleick's Chaos in Costa Rica, Taleb's Black Swan in Curaçao, Rescher's Luck in the Jordanian desert, the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Luck across too many trips to count. Over the years, a picture started forming across philosophy, complexity science, and strategy.Until now, my engagement with this material has been scribbles in margins, early drafts, and notes in notebooks that nobody has read. This series is the attempt to move beyond that: to bring the thinkers together and see whether a synthesis is possible.If any of this resonates, I'd love to hear from you. Use the form below or email me at [email protected].LinkedIn: Rik Visser
The reading that has shaped this investigation so far — organised by the discipline it comes from.Philosophy of Luck
- Nagel, "Moral Luck" (1979)
- Williams, "Moral Luck" (1981)
- Rescher, Luck (1995)
- Harris, Free Will (2012)
- Pritchard, The Philosophy of Luck (2015)
- Church & Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck (2019)
- Broncano-Berrocal, "Luck" (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Psychology & Decision-Making
- Wiseman, The Luck Factor (2003)
- Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk (2008)
- Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
- Hand, The Improbability Principle (2014)
- Tetlock, Superforecasting (2015)
- Duke, Thinking in Bets (2018)
- Busch, The Serendipity Mindset (2020)
- Kahneman, Noise (2021)Complexity Science
- Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
- Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)
- Gleick, Chaos (1987)
- Waldrop, Complexity (1992)
- Peters, "The Ergodicity Problem in Economics" (2019)
- Dellanna, Ergodicity (2020)Business, Strategy & Risk
- Barney, "Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage" (1991)
- Bowman & Hurry, "Strategy Through the Option Lens" (1993)
- Teece, Pisano & Shuen, "Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management" (1997)
- Sarasvathy, "Causation and Effectuation" (2001)
- Taleb, Incerto series — particularly Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007), Antifragile (2012)
- Mauboussin, The Success Equation (2012)
- Frank, Success and Luck (2016)
- Liu & de Rond, "Good Night, and Good Luck" (2016)
- Barabási, The Formula (2018)
- Liu, Luck: A Key Idea for Business and Society (2019)
- Kay & King, Radical Uncertainty (2020)
- Housel, The Psychology of Money (2020)
If any of this resonates, I'd love to hear from you. Use the form below or email me at [email protected].
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