Beyond Luck: Serendipity, Zemblanity & Avoiding Predictable Misfortune
On January 7, 2025, the hills surrounding Los Angeles erupted in flames. Within days, the fires consumed not only vast tracts of land but also thousands of homes, including my own and that of my wife’s parents. As we navigated the immediate aftermath with a toddler and a newborn, a question from my research kept resurfacing: what kind of “luck” was this? It led me to consider the concept of zemblanity – the opposite of serendipity – and how often misfortune isn’t simply random, but structurally built in.
Beyond Good and Bad Luck: Understanding the Luck Matrix
For over a decade, my work has centered on serendipity, the art of turning unexpected events into positive outcomes. But recognizing serendipity also illuminates its counterpart, zemblanity, a term coined by novelist William Boyd to describe the tendency to make unhappy discoveries by design. It’s misfortune that wasn’t accidental, but rather the result of accumulating vulnerabilities. The traditional understanding of luck, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, encompasses both favorable and unfavorable chance occurrences. This captures what’s often called “passive luck” – things that happen to us, outside our control. However, recent research highlights two additional forms of luck where human agency plays a role: serendipity and zemblanity.
To better understand this dynamic, I’ve developed what I call the “luck matrix.” It assesses unintended outcomes based on two dimensions: whether they create positive or negative value, and the extent of human influence. This framework reveals four types of luck. Serendipity is agentic good luck – creating positive value from the unexpected, like the story of the Post-it Note. A 3M scientist, Spencer Silver, accidentally created a weak adhesive in 1968 while trying to develop a super-strong one. Years later, a colleague, Arthur Fry, realized its potential for bookmarks, leading to a multi-billion-dollar product. The Los Angeles wildfires of 2025, however, represent the darker side of this equation.
Zemblanity: Agentic Bad Luck in Action
Zemblanity is agentic bad luck – misfortune arising from patterns of behavior, decisions, or systemic designs that quietly accumulate over time. It often feels unexpected, but in retrospect, it’s often avoidable. This can manifest on a large scale, as seen in disasters like wildfires, but also in toxic work environments or individual choices. Consider someone repeatedly advised to use a walking stick, yet consistently refusing. A fall down the stairs might feel like an accident, but the risk was steadily building. The key difference between passive and active (bad) luck lies in interpretation and prevention. Zemblanity builds subtly, often unnoticed by those experiencing it, but apparent to observers. Passive bad luck, is simply random and unavoidable.
Looking back at the Los Angeles fires, the disaster didn’t begin on January 7, 2025. The underlying vulnerabilities – depleted water reservoirs, dry brush, low-pressure fire hydrants, and inadequate preparedness – had been accumulating for years. A timeline of the Eaton and Palisades fires reveals how these conditions, combined with high Santa Ana winds, created a perfect storm. While the ignition felt sudden, the fragility had been building for a long time. This echoes psychologist James Reason’s “Swiss cheese model” of accident causation, where multiple layers of defense have weaknesses, and catastrophe occurs when those weaknesses align. Zemblanity goes further, highlighting how individuals and systems often exacerbate these vulnerabilities, making misfortune almost inevitable.
From Space Shuttles to Wildfires: Recognizing Systemic Vulnerabilities
We observe this pattern in numerous large-scale disasters, from the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia failures to financial crises and, of course, increasingly frequent and intense wildfires. But the same logic applies to everyday life. A couple whose relationship “unexpectedly” collapses after a single argument likely postponed addressing smaller issues for months. A professional experiencing burnout after a project has often been running on empty for a considerable period. A traveler missing a flight due to traffic blames an unforeseen delay, while ignoring the fact they left with the minimum required time. The instinct is to blame the trigger, while the underlying pattern remains hidden.
Shifting the Question: From “Why Me?” to “What Conditions Allowed This?”
When faced with setbacks, our natural inclination is to ask, “Why did this happen to me?” A more productive question might be: “What conditions – including our own actions and the broader system – made this possible?” While much of life’s misfortune is beyond our control, and we should avoid blaming individuals for bad luck, sometimes a setback reveals patterns that can be changed. Recognizing these patterns requires attentiveness and a willingness to examine the underlying causes, rather than simply reacting to the immediate consequences.
Cultivating Serendipity and Guarding Against Zemblanity
Over a decade of research on unexpected discoveries reveals a consistent pattern: people who cultivate serendipity tend to notice weak signals early, remain curious about anomalies, and treat unexpected moments as information rather than noise. These same habits can assist interrupt zemblanity. Recognizing a system’s fragility, whether in your schedule, relationships, or organization, requires the same attentiveness that helps someone identify a promising idea in an unexpected conversation. Serendipity and zemblanity are therefore closely connected, both emerging from how we engage with our environment and the unintended consequences that follow.
Losing our home was a devastating experience, and that pain remains. But alongside the loss, something unexpected emerged: the experience sparked recent research, renewed my sense of purpose, and fostered a remarkable sense of community around our family. A serendipity mindset isn’t a cure-all, and research shows that access to education, networks, and safety nets significantly influences opportunities for serendipity. However, how we engage with the unexpected remains one of the most powerful tools available to us. It’s crucial to acknowledge the reality of loss and pain, rather than resorting to toxic positivity. As Viktor Frankl eloquently stated, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” We cannot control the fires, storms, or crises, but we can choose how we meet them, and that choice is often where serendipity begins.
My hope is that we increasingly learn to design systems that cultivate serendipity and guard against zemblanity. While some misfortune will always be beyond our control, much of what we call bad luck isn’t purely random, but a pattern already in motion – and patterns can change.