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By Root 566 0

of the failures was of a type considered both commonplace and acceptable. Polisher problems were not unusual at the plant, nor were they normally very serious; with hundreds of valves regularly being opened or closed in a nuclear power plant, leaving some valves in the wrong position was not considered rare or alarming; and the pressure-relief valve was known to be somewhat unreliable and had failed at times without major consequences in at least eleven other power plants. Yet strung together, these failures make the plant seem as if it had been run by the Keystone Kops. And so after the incident at Three Mile Island came many investigations and much laying of blame, as well as a very different consequence. That string of events spurred Yale sociologist Charles Perrow to create a new theory of accidents, in which is codified the central argument of this chapter: in complex systems (among which I count our lives) we should expect that minor factors we can usually ignore will by chance sometimes cause major incidents.8

In his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace’s atoms, impossible to track and anticipate individually. Yet one can bet on the fact that just as atoms executing a drunkard’s walk will eventually get somewhere, so too will accidents eventually occur. Called normal accident theory, Perrow’s doctrine describes how that happens—how accidents can occur without clear causes, without those glaring errors and incompetent villains sought by corporate or government commissions. But although normal accident theory is a theory of why, inevitably, things sometimes go wrong, it could also be flipped around to explain why, inevitably, they sometimes go right. For in a complex undertaking, no matter how many times we fail, if we keep trying, there is often a good chance we will eventually succeed. In fact, economists like W. Brian Arthur argue that a concurrence of minor factors can even lead companies with no particular edge to come to dominate their competitors. “In the real world,” he wrote, “if several similar-sized firms entered a market together, small fortuitous events—unexpected orders, chance meetings with buyers, managerial whims—would help determine which ones received early sales and, over time, which came to dominate. Economic activity is…[determined] by individual transactions that are too small to foresee, and these small ‘random’ events could [ac]cumulate and become magnified by positive feedbacks over time.”9

The same phenomenon has been noticed by researchers in sociology. One group, for example, studied the buying habits of consumers in what sociologists call the cultural industries—books, film, art, music. The conventional marketing wisdom in those fields is that success is achieved by anticipating consumer preference. In this view the most productive way for executives to spend their time is to study what it is about the likes of Stephen King, Madonna, or Bruce Willis that appeals to so many fans. They study the past and, as I’ve just argued, have no trouble extracting reasons for whatever success they are attempting to explain. They then try to replicate it.

That is the deterministic view of the marketplace, a view in which it is mainly the intrinsic qualities of the person or the product that governs success. But there is another way to look at it, a nondeterministic view. In this view there are many high-quality but unknown books, singers, actors, and what makes one or another come to stand out is largely a conspiracy of random and minor factors—that is, luck. In this view the traditional executives are just spinning their wheels.

Thanks to the Internet, this idea has been tested. The researchers who tested it focused on the music market, in which Internet sales are coming to dominate. For their study they recruited 14,341 participants who were asked to listen to, rate, and if they desired, download 48 songs by bands they had not heard of.10 Some of the participants