Serendipity and Happenstance

This afternoon I popped up to the bank and as I was passing the village supermarket I noticed the wall beside their carpark exit had been rebuilt - differently!

Those who follow my blog may remember my post on Smart Persistence on the 30th November. In it I described how the wall was continually being knocked down by trucks only to be rebuilt in the same way then to be knocked down again.

It would be easy for me to convince myself and others that someone in the supermarket hierarchy was reading my blog, saw the innate commonsense of my posting and immediately ordered a re-design of the wall.

In other words my actions brought about positive change for which I am due credit.

In 5th Form at high school my economics teacher introduced us to one of the 'Logical Fallacies' - Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc - and it has stuck with me. It is Latin and means roughly 'after the fact therefore because of the fact'. In other words, it is easy (but often fallacious) to ascribe a cause and effect relationship to two things one of which follows the other.

One week I blog about the need for a wall re-design and the next week it happens. To link the two is a logical fallacy. I doubt anyone at the supermarket read and reacted to my blog. I imagine they resorted to some commonsense thinking of their own and had things well in hand with the re-design long before I started writing about the subject.

Frequently in business good things (and bad things) happen because of serendipity, happenstance of just dumb luck, not action or activity. In the same way that "Success Has Many Fathers" it is often the case that we inadvertently claim the credit for outcomes which were not completely, or at all, resultant from our actions.

To be able to learn and grow, and to repeat past successes, we need to be able to discern when we might be deluding ourselves with a post hoc ergo propter hoc situation. Of course we should also never be so self deprecating tha we hide our true light under a bushel!