Dealing With Randomness

Decisions based on randomness are often taken to be “irrational” or “arbitrary”. The conventional strategy is to fight randomness; a more recent one is to accept and even celebrate randomness. We focus on a third approach that employs randomness as a managerial and social decision-making mechanism in a purposeful way. We argue that Controlled Random Decisions provide considerable advantages. They allow outsiders as well as novel ideas to have an influence, and they work against corruption. When persons and projects are selected, there must be a careful pre-selection. Controlled Random Decisions should be discussed and employed more extensively.