Book Review: Dance with Chance

Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You
Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth, and Anil Gaba
Oneworld Publications (2009)

According to a Hebrew aphorism, “Man plans and then God laughs.” That sums up my own attitude toward “luck.” I prefer good luck to bad luck, of course, but seldom (if ever) can predict — much less control – either. Many people claim, “the harder I work, the luckier I am” but is it really luck? Are there not people who succeed without much (if any) effort and others who fail despite maximum effort? In a word, yes. Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth, and Anil Gaba explain that “to dance with chance is to accept the role and importance of chance and to take advantage of the opportunities it creates while avoiding its negative consequences…giving up illusory control actually increases control [i.e. `the paradox of control'] and results in substantial benefits [whereas] the illusion of control pervades almost all aspects of our lives and can have serious negative implications for our well-being.” So, the book’s purpose is to help its readers to avoid costly mistakes and to help them “exploit the role of luck in the most important aspects of [their lives]“and to “seek both beauty and opportunity and take some life-enhancing steps of [their] own.”

All well and good but how? Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba recommend what they call a “Triple A Approach”: Accept the fact that the world is uncertain and therefore the future cannot be predicted, although possibilities can be identified; assess the nature of the uncertainty by using all of the information available to identify and (if possible) to measure the degree of probability of each of the aforementioned “possibilities”; and then augment the assessment to include contingencies not previously considered plausible. If I fully understand this approach (and I may not), its primary purpose is to help all illusions of control by revealing the role that chance (or “luck”) plays as we proceed each day into an uncertain future. In this context, I am reminded of Lily Tomlin’s observation that reality “is a collective hunch.”

On Page 256, the authors provide a list of the principles behind all the stories they share in the first part of the book and then assert that, when it comes to making decisions, the importance of taking uncertainty into full account is paramount. The “Triple A Approach” offers one strategy. Another “is to support intuitive hunches (or `blinking’) by thinking wherever possible – remember the chess grand masters and their years of painstaking practice. As for the remarkable properties of simple modeling (or `sminking’), decision-makers tend to under-exploit them, while relying excessively on the opinions of experts who are immune to the consequences of their expertise.”

This is by no means an “easy read” but it generously rewards those who read it with appropriate care. (I felt obliged to re-read portions of several chapters and expect others to do the same.) Of greatest interest and value to me is how effectively Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba challenge, indeed repudiate a number of well-entrenched assumptions about chance (or “luck”), business forecasting, contingency planning, “creative destruction,” superstition, and the subject of Chapter 12, “the inevitability of decisions.” As I finished reading this book, I recalled a prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, one with which I conclude this review:

“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.”