In 1975, psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a series of experiments that became classics of behavioral psychology: people were offered the chance to buy a lottery ticket that was either handed out randomly or chosen by themselves. Objectively, the chances of winning were absolutely identical. However, the participants who chose the ticket themselves agreed to sell it back only for a significantly higher price—they acted as if their choice genuinely increased the likelihood of winning in a purely random game. Langer called this the illusion of control: a systematic overestimation of how much our actions influence events that are actually determined by chance or external factors.
The effect is amplified when the process includes elements resembling skill—choice, active participation, a familiar environment—even if objectively these elements have no bearing on the outcome. And it is particularly persistent among people accustomed to success: the more often a person's decisions coincided with a good result in the past, the stronger the tendency to attribute it exclusively to their own skill rather than to a favorable confluence of circumstances.
In management, this creates a persistent and difficult-to-diagnose bias. A manager whose team has delivered an excellent quarter naturally links the result to their managerial decisions—even though the market may have been favorable, a competitor may have stumbled, and the team's composition may have been fortunate in itself, regardless of management style. The same works in reverse, though it is less frequently noticed: a bad quarter is often blamed on external circumstances rather than on one's own decisions—an asymmetry that prevents the manager from learning from actual mistakes.
The danger of the illusion of control is not that it makes people overconfident in a general sense—but that it distorts the very ability to learn from experience. If success and failure are explained retrospectively and arbitrarily—depending on what is psychologically more comfortable—feedback from reality ceases to function as feedback.
What helps:
regularly and honestly breaking down the result into its components—what was a decision, what was context, and what was chance;
conducting post-mortem practices not only for failures but also for successes, specifically testing the alternative explanation "what if the decisions had been different, would the result have turned out roughly the same?";
and involving an external, less emotionally invested perspective when reviewing one's own decisions—following the same logic as in the Solomon's paradox.