Dear reader,
Luck and misfortune play a greater role in working life than we often care to admit. In high-risk work — both physically and mentally — the line between success and failure can be razor-thin. Yet we rarely speak openly about the role of chance.
Perhaps because acknowledging it challenges our notion of control. Understanding luck and misfortune is not only a professional distinction; it also has an existential dimension. When we recognise that not everything is under our control, we are confronted with conditions such as randomness, powerlessness, and vulnerability. It can feel uncomfortable — but it can also foster a more realistic, fair, and humane culture.
Working consciously with luck and misfortune requires courage to face these conditions. In return, it strengthens fairness in our assessments, the quality of our learning — and the communities that need to hold together when outcomes turn out differently than hoped.
Rikke Høgsted, the institute’s founder, describes in an interview with Børn & Unge on Psychological First Aid how her path into crisis psychology began almost by chance. Through work with severe traffic accidents, it became clear how much luck and misfortune matter — even in professional work. This insight has since been a central pillar of the institute’s approach: we must be able to distinguish between genuine mistakes and outcomes where luck and misfortune play a decisive role — even when the consequences are serious — if we want to create fair and learning communities.
In this newsletter, you will find a link to the interview with Rikke Høgsted, access to the institute’s own article on luck, misfortune, and pseudo-errors, as well as this month’s prevention tool. Finally, meet our talented colleague Daniel Wirenfeldt.
Happy reading.
Best regards,
From all of us at the Institute for Strain Psychology
Photo: Jeppe Carlsen
In an interview with Børn & Unge, Rikke Høgsted explains how her path into crisis psychology began almost by accident — through encounters with people who had survived severe traffic accidents. It also became clear to her how much luck and misfortune can matter, and why workplace communities are often the most important protection when something extreme occurs.
When something goes well, we often attribute it to skill. When something goes wrong, we quickly link it to incompetence or professional negligence. But reality is rarely that simple. Outcomes can depend on luck and misfortune — and it is therefore crucial to distinguish between genuine mistakes and the “errors” that only appear in hindsight.
In many workplace communities, decisions are only evaluated correctly once the outcome is known. But the outcome rarely tells the whole story. This month’s exercise can be used with staff or in a team meeting to sharpen awareness of where luck and misfortune play a role — and where the decision was actually professionally justified.
Daniel is a web developer, trained at KEA. At the institute, he is part of the team currently refining and finalizing the development of MentiMove – our upcoming platform that makes it easy to work in a structured and engaging way with the psychosocial work environment.
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Danish