Luck is not a strategy. But it is part of the job.

In June 2007, my co-founders and I started Happen. The timing looked terrible. Fourteen months later, the global financial system collapsed.

It turned out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us - for reasons that are not quite what you might expect.

What the boom had produced

By 2007, the innovation industry had developed a particular aesthetic. If you hired a consultancy to help you think about the future, you got Hawaiian shirts, bean bags, and a great deal of lofty language about transformation. The work was often genuinely creative. It was less often genuinely commercial. At the end of a long boom, when capital was cheap and ambition was easy, that had been fine. People could afford to think big and measure loosely.

Happen's proposition was different from the start. We were interested in practical, commercial innovation - the kind that could be traced back to a number on a client's P&L. We tracked the incremental value we added. We built processes that started with what a client already owned - their assets, their relationships, their existing market positions - rather than from a blank sheet of vision. Asset-led innovation, we called it, which at the time felt like a fairly unglamorous thing to be doing compared to the competition.

When the crash came, it turned out to be exactly what the world needed.

Why the bad moment was the right moment

Overnight, there was no capital expenditure. Nobody was funding transformation programmes. The Hawaiian shirts went back in the wardrobe. What clients wanted instead was growth from what they already had - defensible, measurable, built on real assets rather than optimistic assumptions. That was precisely the problem Happen had been set up to solve.

We didn't pivot, we doubled down on our positioning. We tightened the proposition, sharpened the measurement, and got more specific about the commercial value we were delivering. Over the years that followed, the business helped clients generate over $10 billion of net incremental value. We scaled through the downturn, growing revenue every year while competitors retrenched.

Now, was that skill? Partly. We had built something with genuine commercial rigour at a moment when that rigour turned out to matter enormously. We didn't have a crystal ball or perfect foresight - we didn't foresee the crash. We were not positioning against it. We happened to be standing at an intersection where what we were good at was exactly what the world suddenly needed, and we were still standing there when it arrived.

That is what luck in business often looks like. Not a coin landing the right way. A clear position meeting a moment.

What the research says

Richard Wiseman's The Luck Factor, based on a ten-year study of people who consistently described themselves as lucky or unlucky, found that lucky people tended to do four things: create and notice opportunities, trust their intuition, expect good outcomes, and turn bad events into something useful. That last one is the most interesting. The crash was objectively a bad event. What made it useful for Happen was that we had built something specific enough to find its footing in the wreckage, and we were honest enough with ourselves to recognise what the moment was calling for - and run toward it rather than away.

Michael Mauboussin's The Success Equation adds a useful frame here: in luck-heavy settings, which most strategic decisions are, one bad outcome tells you very little about whether your underlying position is right. The instinct after a crash, for most organisations, is to treat the bad outcome as evidence that the bet was wrong. Sometimes that is correct. But often it is exactly the wrong conclusion, because the bad outcome is market-wide noise, and the underlying position is still sound. The organisations that pushed through the 2008 downturn and came out stronger were not, on the whole, the ones with the most daring vision. They were the ones that had built something specific enough to survive, and held it long enough for the market to catch up.

Ask Jeeves got there first - and the opposite happened

It is worth putting the Happen story next to a counterexample, because the lesson is not simply "be in position and good things happen."

Ask Jeeves launched in 1996 with a natural-language, question-and-answer approach to search, which now looks uncannily close to the way people interact with AI assistants. It was a reasonable idea, held with reasonable conviction, by people who were not obviously making a mistake. But it did not have the timing, the infrastructure, or the market habit to win the category, and after years of decline its search business finally closed on May 1, 2026. Right idea, wrong moment. Thirty years of waiting, and the moment arrived too late for the company that had the original vision.

The difference between Ask Jeeves and Happen is not that one was smarter or braver or better managed. It is that one position met its moment and one didn't. That is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with, because it means that some of what separates success from failure is outside your control - and that holding a good position with conviction is necessary but not sufficient.

The two traps

There are two predictable mistakes here, and large and small businesses make both of them.

The first is false certainty: the belief that if the strategy is coherent, the result should follow. It produces organisations that treat the plan as the outcome, and that are quietly hostile to anyone who asks what would have to be true for the plan to be wrong. It produces organisations where the honest answer - "we don't know yet" - feels like a weakness, when it is usually the most accurate thing anyone in the room could say.

The second is false randomness: the belief that persistence alone will eventually bend events your way, even when the underlying thesis has stopped being true. Nassim Taleb's warning in Fooled by Randomness is pointed here - we are very good at constructing retrospective explanations for survival that credit skill and quietly remove the luck. Some people are not skillfully holding a position. They are simply waiting for a moment that may not come.

The difference between those two traps is not always obvious from the outside. It requires honest internal accounting: not "is the market wrong about us?" but "what would have to be true for this position to be right, and is that still true?" That is a harder question than it sounds, especially under pressure - and it is the question that most frameworks, in my experience, do not help you answer.

What this means in practice

If you want to give luck a better chance of helping you, the Happen experience suggests three things.

Build something specific. The organisations that benefit most from unexpected moments are the ones that have built something with a clear and defensible edge - not broad competence but a particular answer to a particular problem. When the moment comes, specificity is what lets you recognise it and respond quickly. Generality just means you can pivot toward it slowly, which is usually too late.

Hold the position long enough to test it properly. Many ideas die not because they were wrong, but because the organisation got bored or nervous before the answer could show up. That is a leadership problem as much as a strategy problem. The gap between a good position and a rewarded one is sometimes just time - and the willingness to absorb the cost of the wait.

Treat bad luck as information, not verdict. The crash was, on one reading, the worst possible moment to start a consulting business. On another reading - the one that turned out to be right - it was the moment that clarified exactly what we had built and who needed it. Bad events are often the clearest signal you will get about whether your position is genuinely specific or just generically ambitious. The map is not the territory, and the territory has a way of showing you where the map was too neat.

Where this leaves us

Luck is not a substitute for strategy, and it is not a reward for effort. It is a set of conditions that occasionally aligns with a position you have built - and the honest version of most business success stories includes both halves of that sentence.

I have been lucky. Happen was lucky. The crash arrived at the right moment for the proposition we had built, and we were specific enough and stubborn enough and, yes, fortunate enough to make the most of it. The frameworks are useful for understanding why certain positions are stronger than others. What they are less useful for is the bit that comes before - the decision to back a specific future before the proof arrives, and to stay with it while the conditions around it are still uncertain.

Something I've often wondered about since is how much of what we call strategy is really just position, and how much of what we call success is really just timing?

Sources and inspiration: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness; Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor; Michael J. Mauboussin, The Success Equation; Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh, How Luck Happens; Ask Jeeves / Ask.com shutdown: TechCrunch (May 2026), The Verge (May 2026), The Register (May 2026).