Hello friends,

Welcome to Episode 40 of Theory of Change, the newsletter that doesn’t like birthdays. Each week I share actionable lessons from my 20 years transforming arts, media, and social change organisations.

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Today, I want to talk about luck and the mythology surrounding it.

“Luck Surface Area” is a term Jim Collins popularised to explain why some teams (and people) attract disproportionate opportunity. The formula sounds simple:

Luck Surface Area = (Doing Meaningful Work) × (Making It Visible)

The more meaningful work you put out into the world, the more likely opportunity will find you.

But here’s the part the hustle bros don’t say out loud: this idea is structurally biased toward extroverts and digital performers.

So today: a reframed, less-performative take on Luck Surface Area. One built for people doing substantive work with limited bandwidth and zero interest in thought leadership theatre.

🍀 LUCK SURFACE AREA 🍀

“The luckiest people have a massive luck surface area. They expose themselves to more luck than the average human. – Sahil Bloom

What we call “luck” is often just the visible outcome of thousands of small, accumulated actions and decisions. 

To increase your luck surface area is to increase the number and quality of public signals your organisation sends that make you discoverable to opportunities (funding, partnerships, media, collaborators).

For most of us in nonprofits, social change, or creator-led spaces, the default interpretation of “expanding your luck surface area” sounds like:

• Publish LinkedIn thinkpieces until you burn out or go algorithmically feral

• Humblebrag about your subscriber numbers whenever possible

• Speak at every panel (even the ones you are not invited to)

For many leaders I work with, especially those working on community-centred, equity-driven, or systems-change projects, this isn’t just unappealing. It’s not possible. They’re juggling busy lives and their work demands that they centre the voices of others.

So we’re going to need to approach this differently.

Why it works

Luck surface area as a concept is still relevant, because opportunity in my experience doesn’t flow through content volume. It flows primarily through networks and social systems.

In systems terms: opportunity is a network effect, not a broadcast effect.

Most funder invitations, partnership offers, and community engagements don’t arrive through cold discovery or random algorithmic reach. They arrive because someone inside a decision-making loop references your name, your work, or your thinking at the right moment.

That social proximity (the likelihood that your work is surfaced in adjacent conversations) is shaped by:

• Weak ties: Casual contacts who remember your work when a window opens

• Network spillover: A partner, funder, or peer forwarding your output to the right person

• Reputational pathways: Your visible thinking shaping how others describe your expertise when you’re not in the room

In field-building and systems change contexts, credibility travels primarily through relational infrastructure, not marketing channels. It’s why small, intentional signals often outperform mass outreach.

The goal then, dear friends, isn’t to go viral; it’s to become referable inside the right networks.

How to make it work for you

As a purpose-led leader or community-facing creator, you need to focus on the intersection of meaningful output and strategic visibility. Right people, right channels, right timing. Warm networks, peer spaces, funder briefings. Reports that surface nuance. Process notes that invite dialogue.

Get started

I use Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s “Tiny Experiments” framework for increasing luck surface area. That is to say: focus on small, low-risk, high-learning actions. No scale or strategy decks, just purposeful signal testing.

Here’s how I think about it:

• Define a learning question. Small, specific, tied to actual decision-making. Less “how do I scale?” more “does this engage the right people?”

• Time-box it. A few hours of time. No multi-month GANTT charts.

• Run. Observe. Adjust. Track responses, conversations opened, names showing up in your inbox that weren’t before.

(Want to go deeper? You can read more about Tiny Experiments here).

Take it to the next level

Finding it hard to get onto funders’ radars or break through in a new community space? The following have worked extremely well for me in the past:

• Funder learning emails. Send a short, candid update to a key funder, not about deliverables, but about what your team is learning right now. Highlight one emerging insight or challenge. End with a question that invites dialogue.

• Co-authored field blogs. Reach out to a peer organisation and propose a short, joint blog post on a shared tension or pattern you’re both seeing in your field.

• Process note. Instead of another generic “delighted to announce” blog post, publish a short behind-the-scenes process note.

• Closed peer risk sessions. Invite 5-10 trusted peers or potential collaborators to a 45-minute, invite-only Zoom (or in-person) session focused on one area of mutual benefit (or risk).

The skinny: you don’t need more content. You need more signal per unit of energy inside the actual ecosystems where your work already circulates: Subreddits, listservs, Patreon comments, funder calls, partner briefings, Slack channels, sector roundtables, etc.

🔮 FUTUREPROOFING 🔮

We’re about to enter a filtering phase.

AI-generated content has already tipped the system toward overload. I now get at least 40 AI-generated outreach emails a week (most of them indistinct, irrelevant, and tone-deaf) with offers to optimise my YouTube channel, 10x my inbound, and rewrite my LinkedIn bio.

Sector-wide, the same pattern is playing out: funders, journalists, and field leaders are being flooded with templated outreach, auto-generated newsletters, and synthetic thought leadership.

At this stage I’m convinced that the early productivity gains of AI - faster writing, scalable outreach, and “infinite interns” (Benedict Evans’ term not mine, see this from 2018) - are already being cancelled out by the sheer volume of low-quality output it’s facilitating.

We’ve seen this before. Early webmail collapsed under spam until filters evolved. The same trajectory is now playing out across comms ecosystems.

What does this mean for you? In practice:

• Stop publishing generic outputs. AI can do those now and everyone sees it (this is a note to self, more than anything!).

• Anchor everything in IRL experience. Field data, community voice, and decision-level reflections.

• Shrink your audience focus. Informal community gatherings and closed learning loops > mass newsletters to disengaged lists.

• Make your language harder to fake through nuance, tension, and specificity. Write sentences with your fingerprints all over them.

• Invest in relational infrastructure (CRMs or community spaces), not just digital reach.

🪁 PARALLEL PLAY 🪁

• Babe, wake up. Nerdwriter has a new video: He Painted Bugs Like Jewels — And Changed Science Forever.

• Scamming Substack? How to get money for nothing and likes for free on the world’s favourite newsletter platform. Brilliant from Will Storr (my 5c: the marketing bros have found Substack; it’s over).

• This web visualisation of murmurations (think starling flocks in autumn) is so much fun. And pretty much how my thoughts work in 36 degree heat.

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

If you’ve been feeling invisible, but unwilling to play the LinkedIn performance game, today’s newsletter is your permission slip to opt out of that and opt into something more edifying.

I’ve been considering my LinkedIn presence a lot right now. When I post a lot, my subscriber numbers go up. But to make a serious dent, I need to use AI to repurpose my content. And it just doesn’t read well. It feels like farming engagement. I need another way.

And that way is trust-based distribution.

For example, 128 people hit the webpage of last week’s newsletter. That traffic came almost entirely from forwards, referrals, and DMs.

So here’s this week’s Tiny Experiment. I need your help running it.

If this edition landed for you, if it helped clarify something you’ve been wrestling with around visibility, forward it to one person in your network who’s also stuck between “do nothing” and “play the LinkedIn game.”

It would help me out, and who knows, maybe you’ll find a collaborator, mentor, or sparring partner for your latest idea. Let’s see if trust-based distribution can beat the algorithm.

Stay safe,

Adam

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