There are many factors involved in success, and luck is undoubtedly one of them.  It can be hard, therefore, to understand exactly how much of a particular outcome was due to the skill of the individual involved, and how much was down to external factors, such as luck.

For those involved in evaluating performances, such a distinction is crucial, and new research from the University of Technology Sydney used football to illustrate just how big a role luck often plays.

“There was no significant difference in the average performance of the players who either scored or did not score after hitting a post,” the researchers say.

Influencing the coach

Despite chance typically playing the biggest role in whether the ball went into the goal or not, those who luckily managed to score were given significantly more playing time in subsequent games, and were given higher ratings from fans and journalists, than those whose shot hit the post and didn’t go into the net.

This phenomenon was even more pronounced if the goal was critical to the outcome of the match, or when the player was young and therefore had not yet established themselves in the team.

“We found clear evidence that luck was overly influencing managers’ decisions and evaluators’ ratings of footballers, and this tendency is likely to be widespread in business and other fields,” the researchers say.  “If you get bias in a situation like the football pitch, where a player’s actions are highly scrutinised and there is a huge amount of data, then it is likely to be pervasive in the workplace, where there is much less information.”

Luck at work

These things tend to be even more important in the workplace, with rewards and recognition often hinging on our apparent success.  Often, however, it can be even harder for managers to objectively assess our performance than it can for a football coach.

Luck can play just as important a role in the workplace as on the football pitch, whether in terms of being placed with high performing colleagues or the project’s success being down to external factors outside of one’s control.

“Managers and decision makers need to be educated about how to recognise outcome bias, which is when we judge an action by its outcome, rather than the quality of the decision,” the researchers say.  “If someone throws a brick out of an apartment window and it doesn’t kill anyone, that doesn’t mean it was a good idea.”

A better approach is to ensure process is taken into account, so you’re judging the inputs people put into something rather than the outputs they get out the other end.  Outcomes can often be inherently imperfect, yet because they’re the most easily observable aspect of a process, they tend to be what we use to judge things on.

By doing this however, we run the very real risk of introducing inefficiencies and inequities into the allocation of rewards, sanctions and promotions at work.

“It could mean that those who do not have the skills to do the job are promoted, while those with talent go unrecognised,” the researchers say.  “Success also breed’s success, so those who were lucky in the past are assumed to be more competent, and offered further opportunities, while those who are unlucky are ignored.”

If people are judged purely on outcomes, then it might also encourage them to take excessive risks in order to secure those outcomes.  It’s important, therefore, to try and focus instead on what each employee contributed to the process rather than what the outcomes were, as that’s the only way to take luck truly out of the equation.