Head's Blog | Lucky Generals | Embley School, Hampshire

Better lucky generals than skilled ones… I’m not so sure that Napoleon ever uttered these words, but they live with his reputation in eternity. 

Old Boney seemed to suggest that ‘luck’ was a quality of character. Some have it, some don’t, and for those who are the ‘lucky’ ones, life would be good. I’m not such a fan of determinism, but suppose he had a point? It may be no easier to disprove this than to prove it, such evidence that could be called on could certainly be argued either way. It may depend on what we are calling or how we are defining ‘luck’.

No doubt reader you will have been told that you are lucky to have this or to have done that; lucky to have such a good team or that the quarter end was so good. But is that really the chance result of fate playing humans as dice? “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods…” Gloucester in King Lear ruminates on chance and good fortune. The Romans augured divine will - there seems to be a long history of this sort of thing. But suppose we saw luck differently? I’m not so sure you see that luck comes into it. That said I have knocked on wood, well it doesn’t hurt, does it?

Suppose we saw a quality in generals and others who lead that conceals itself as luck but is a decision making that follows a different rubric? Suppose we look on this as the educated use of intuition or gut feeling about what the correct thing to do is. John Henry Newman talked about the illative sense when he tried to set out the sense we have of and for God. He understood it to be beyond reason, not necessarily supernatural, more supra natural. The ancient library at Alexandria catalogued all the works about nature or φυσικά (what we call physics) and the works that are not about the world of nature, the works that come after physics (what we call metaphysics; των μετὰ τὰ φυσικά). A metaphysic did just that, it was beyond nature. The fact that we cannot measure it or that we are powerless to observe it, doesn’t mean it isn’t at work. To be fair, we cannot see gravity either, we do feel its effect though. We can observe friends, but we can neither see nor measure friendship. “There are more things in heaven and on earth Horatio...” so maybe there is something to seeing luck as applied intuition; the opportunity to take a chance or a risk when all of the factors to facilitate that risk are not available. Of course, this last point begs the question of if you ever have enough data to make a decision? While I do not consider myself to be impetuous, I do favour action over procrastinated navel gazing, waiting for the answer to appear from the fog of indecision as if by magic. It may in fact be the real superstition.
 
Saturday last, I was a panel member at a discussion about leadership in the modern world and how schools should prepare students for this. I didn’t table luck, no surprise I guess. (I wonder how that discussion might have landed? We should spend time making children lucky or teaching them luck… the mind boggles.) I did table a few ideas that seemed to resonate with the audience, one of them has little to do with luck but defines the role.
 
If children are going to lead, they need to have some understanding of why they want it, as a badge of prestige or in the service of an ideal? The former will be hugely problematic. Spoiler alert! Things will go wrong, and difficulty will abound. If you lead for the title or the so-called prestige, you will find it a hollow crown and a mantle more weighty for the vacuity of its being held. To be in service to an ideal bigger than oneself makes meaning of difficulty and emboldens decisions because, while the direction may not be without obstruction, it is nevertheless clear. This is the epitome of what Nietzsche meant when he wrote that with a ‘why’ we can cope with any ‘how’. Leadership is an honour, a privilege, a role of service in support of those who gather to serve an ideal bigger than themselves. I suspect it requires not less than everything and maybe some lucky generals.