In 2025, Associate Professor Christian Busch’s Palisades home burned down in one of the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history. Busch says the disaster wasn’t blind bad luck, it was a clear case of “zemblanity,” which he defines as a patterned and preventable form of misfortune built into the way a system, organization or individual operates.
“There is this whole system that was set up for failure: lack of water in hydrants, lack of pre-deployment of fire trucks despite warnings, lack of coordination, brush not cleared,” Busch said. “You only realize in hindsight there were a lot of things that were actually set up for failure.”
Busch’s research explores how human and organizational choices can create misfortune through repeated choices, ignored warning signs, and patterns that quietly embed fragility. These vulnerabilities can compound into what appears to be bad luck.
“There’s a certain active choice [that creates active bad luck],” Busch explained. “Sometimes it is about missing those warning signals, but a lot of times it’s also just doing the wrong thing over and over and over and over again.”
In his recent TED Talk, Busch emphasizes that zemblanity is not merely blind bad luck. It’s the result of human agency and faulty decision-making embedding fragility into systems, organizations, and personal habits.
He gives the example of an elderly man who refuses to use his walking stick, despite instructions from his doctor. When the man falls down the stairs one day, he may blame it on other factors, such as ill-placed shoes, but in truth, he’s generated his own bad luck through his repeated choices.
Oversights leading to catastrophic outcomes can also occur on larger organizational levels. In his research, the associate professor examines how optimizing for the wrong priorities can set up a company for long-term failure.
As an example, he points to Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer that faced intense scrutiny for safety failures that resulted in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. Public investigations pointed to a combination of design failures, production pressure, communication breakdowns, and oversight failure.
“[Boeing] used to be this amazing engineering-driven company, and they were world-class,” Busch explained. “The zemblanity lesson is what can happen when organizations optimize so intensely for efficiency, cost, and speed that they weaken the very capabilities that made them excellent in the first place, like safety in this case.”
According to Busch, this flawed decision-making process is spreading in the modern world.
“Zemblanity is on the rise because today’s systems are increasingly interconnected, meaning that small flaws can have far-reaching effects,” Busch wrote in an article. “They are more optimised, stripping away slack and redundancy in the name of efficiency. And they operate in a world of heightened volatility, with climate shocks, AI-driven interdependencies and geopolitical disruptions becoming the norm. When efficiency outpaces resilience, even tiny cracks can trigger massive breakdowns.”
