Some misfortune falls from the sky, some quietly builds beneath our feet.

The opposite of serendipity has a name: zemblanity.

Sometimes the seeds of bad luck are planted long before the crisis.

Not all bad luck is completely random. Sometimes it’s a pattern quietly taking shape.

On January 7, 2025, wildfires ravaged Los Angeles. Within hours, my home, my wife’s parents’ home, and thousands of others were gone. My wife and I, together with our toddler and five-week-old baby, got out safely. But as we faced the challenges that followed, I kept returning to a question I have spent much of the past decade researching: what kind of “luck” was this?

For more than a decade, my work has focused on serendipity, the process through which people turn unexpected events into positive outcomes. But that work has also made me aware of its dark counterpart: zemblanity. Novelist William Boyd introduced the term as the opposite of serendipity, describing the tendency to make unhappy discoveries by design. In other words, misfortune that was already structurally in the making, and not just accidental bad luck that appeared out of nowhere.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines luck as “the chance occurrence of situations or events either favourable or unfavourable to a person's interests.” This traditional understanding captures two familiar types of luck: good luck, something unexpectedly positive that we did not influence, and bad luck, something negative that happens randomly, outside our control. Both of these forms of luck are “passive luck”: they happen to us, without any input or action, and they are completely outside our control. But recent research has begun to focus on two additional forms of luck, in which human agency plays a stronger role: serendipity and zemblanity.

One way to explore this dynamic is through what I call the luck matrix. It looks at unintended outcomes along two dimensions: whether they create positive or negative value, and whether human agency played a meaningful role in shaping them. In this framework, there are essentially four types of luck.

Serendipity is agentic good luck; it happens when people create positive value through how they engage with the unexpected. An illustrative example of this is the Post-it Note. In 1968, a 3M scientist named Spencer Silver was trying to invent a super-strong adhesive. Instead, he accidentally created the opposite: a weak glue that barely stuck. At first, it seemed useless until years later, his colleague Arthur Fry used the adhesive to keep bookmarks from slipping out of his church hymnal. The result is now a multi-billion-dollar product. The breakthrough was not the accident itself, but someone connecting the dots that this would actually be useful, and then taking action. Other well-known examples include penicillin, the microwave oven, and Velcro. But serendipity also shows up in everyday life: when people unexpectedly discover a new career path, find a life partner, or turn a crisis into an inflection point.

Zemblanity is the darker counterpart. It is agentic bad luck: misfortune that emerges from patterns of behavior, decisions, or system designs that quietly accumulate over time to create the conditions that make misfortune increasingly possible. It might feel unexpected in the moment, but in hindsight, it was usually avoidable. This can happen on the systemic level, as in disasters like wildfires, but also in toxic corporate cultures or in individual decision-making. Imagine someone repeatedly advised to use a walking stick but who ignores the advice. One day, they fell down the stairs. It may feel like an unfortunate accident, but the inevitability had been building for some time.

The difference between passive and active (bad) luck matters for how we interpret setbacks and how we prevent them. Zemblanity tends to build quietly and rarely announces itself, at least to the person experiencing it, but others around them often “see it coming.” Whereas passive bad luck just happens and there is nothing we can do about it and no one to blame. (And it often shapes inequality in ways we cannot control.)

How Zemblanity Builds

Looking back, the Los Angeles fires did not really begin on January 7. Yes, the high winds were part of the trigger that escalated the situation. But the underlying vulnerabilities had been forming for years: empty water reservoirs, dry brush, low-pressure fire hydrants, gaps in preparedness, among many others. While the disaster felt sudden, the fragility had been building into the system for a long time.

Psychologist James Reason described a similar dynamic through the Swiss cheese model of accident causation: Complex systems have multiple layers of defense, each with small weaknesses; catastrophe occurs when those weaknesses align. What appears to be a single unlucky moment is often the point where many smaller vulnerabilities finally line up. Zemblanity goes one step further: It highlights how individuals and systems often keep digging and expanding those holes themselves, until misfortune becomes almost inevitable.

We see this pattern in large disasters, from space shuttle failures to financial crises to wildfires that spiral out of control. But the same logic appears in everyday life. The couple whose relationship “unexpectedly” collapses after one painful argument has often postponed smaller repairs for months; the professional who “unexpectedly” burns out after a project has often been running on empty batteries for a long time; or the traveler who “unexpectedly” misses a flight after leaving with exactly the required time may blame an unexpected traffic jam. People’s instinct is to blame the trigger. Because while the unwanted outcome is visible, the pattern behind it often remains hidden until we look closely. But upon closer examination, the vulnerability was already there.

A Different Question After Setbacks

When something goes wrong, our instinct is to ask: Why did this happen to me? A more useful question may be: What conditions (including our own actions, but also the broader system around us) made this possible? Much of life’s misfortune does lie outside our control, and we should never moralize bad luck, but sometimes a setback reveals patterns that can be changed.

Across more than a decade of research about unexpected discoveries, one pattern appears again and again: people who cultivate serendipity tend to notice weak signals early, remain curious about anomalies, and treat unexpected moments as information rather than noise. Those same habits can interrupt zemblanity. Recognizing that a “system” is becoming fragile, whether in your schedule, your relationships, or your organization, requires the same attentiveness that helps someone notice a promising idea in an unexpected conversation. Serendipity and zemblanity are therefore closely connected, and both emerge from how we engage with our environment and the unintended consequences that follow.

Losing our home was devastating and that pain is real and it does not simply go away. I still wake up some mornings and cannot quite believe it happened. But alongside the loss, something unexpected also emerged: The experience sparked new research, renewed my sense of purpose, and brought out an extraordinary sense of community around our family. Out of the ashes, something new is beginning to rise. A serendipity mindset is not a cure-all, and our research shows that access to education, networks, and safety nets strongly shapes people’s opportunities for serendipity. But how we engage with the unexpected remains one of the most powerful tools available to us individually.

An important note: acknowledging reality and then focusing on what we can still shape is very different from toxic positivity or pretending pain does not exist. Viktor Frankl, whose work has deeply influenced my thinking, wrote that “everything can be taken from a [hu]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, the storms, or the 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. Because while some misfortune will always remain beyond our control, much of what we call bad luck is not purely random, but is a pattern already in motion, and patterns can change.

Boyd, 2001. Armadillo. New York City: Knopf.

Busch, C. 2020. The Serendipity Mindset. New York: Penguin Random House.

Busch, C. 2024. Towards a theory of serendipity: A systematic review and conceptualization. Journal of Management Studies, 61(3): 1110-1151.

Busch, C. 2025. The hidden architecture of failure. LSE Business Review. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2025/09/08/the-hidden-architecture-of-failure-understanding-zemblanity/

Busch, C., Grimes, M.G., & Eisenhardt, K.M. Unintended consequences by design: A complexity theory perspective on zemblanity and serendipity in entrepreneurship. Organization Science Winter Conference.

Giustiniano, L., Cunha, M. P., & Clegg, S. 2016. The dark side of organizational improvisation: Lessons from the sinking of Costa Concordia. Business Horizons, 59(2): 223-232.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2026. Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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