Remember that one time you left your phone behind at the office which just so happened to coincide with the one time your spouse really needed to get in touch with you, but couldn’t as a result, ruining some very special occasion you’d been planning for weeks? Not to mention you got a flat tire on the way home while it was raining and spilled coffee all over your pants.
We all know this. It’s called Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
It was named after Edward Murphy, a safety engineer working on aircraft systems. He understood that life isn’t a one-off trial, it’s an iterative game. Roll the dice enough times, and eventually they won’t land your way. It sounds pessimistic but it’s just statistics.
Bestselling author Nassim Taleb tells us why. To paraphrase: Imagine a drug that cures pain instantly, with only a 1-in-1,000 chance of serious side effects. Sounds great until someone uses it 2,000 times over their lifetime. Suddenly it’s less a miracle cure, more Russian Roulette.
A 1-in-50,000 chance of brake failure sounds safe. Until someone takes 100,000 drives.
Murphy knew this. Small probabilities accumulate. Given enough iterations, the unlikely becomes inevitable.
We learned this working with a prestigious element of the U.S. military earlier this year, where there’s zero margin for error. Technical excellence isn’t optional, it’s existential.
So how do you actually achieve it at scale? Not through command and control. Through culture.
We identified how technical excellence needed to show up in daily operations, then captured it in core beliefs and relentlessly socialized them through language, visuals, environmental design, and strategic leadership communication.
The process is straightforward (in theory): Decide where you’re going. Then ask: How do we actually have to think and act to get there?
But there’s a harder question for any leader: How do you get people excited not just about the mission, but about becoming who they need to become to achieve it?
Goals don’t execute themselves. Visions don’t align people automatically. The problem is always people.
Which is another way of saying: the solution is always people, too.
Murphy’s Law says the system will eventually fail. Culture is how you build people and teams who won’t.
