Why This OD Consultant Never Prays
After seventeen years as an organizational design consultant, I have a professional affliction: I see accountability structures everywhere.
In meetings, I untangle accountability. During layoffs, I untangle accountability. Eventually, it started bleeding into my personal life. At a restaurant, I’d look at the menu and wonder whether the pricing authority sits with the head chef or the owner.
So when a friend asked me, “How come you never go to a temple to pray?”, my answer was simple:
“The accountability is unclear.”
Let me unpack that. Those words carry at least a few layers of meaning.
When it works, who gets the credit? When it doesn’t, who takes the blame?
You go to a temple and make a wish. There are only two possible outcomes.
The wish comes true. Congratulations, divine blessing. But did you really do nothing during that time? Doesn’t your own effort count? If you got that year-end bonus, was it because you worked overtime every day, or because you visited Lingyin Temple back in January?
The wish didn’t come true. Then clearly, your heart wasn’t sincere enough.
The phrase “sincerity brings results” is the underlying architecture of this entire system. Its brilliance lies in one elegant design: all success is attributed to the system; all failure is attributed to the user.
An organizational design professional encountering this structure will feel physically uncomfortable. My daily job is helping companies sort out exactly this question: who gets credit for success, and who bears accountability for failure. If you told me your company runs a performance system where good results are credited to leadership’s wisdom and bad results are blamed on employee execution, I would make you tear the whole thing up and start over.
And yet this same logic has been running in temples for thousands of years, with remarkably high customer satisfaction.
Some prayers are perfectly measurable. Most are not.
To be fair, not all prayers are hopeless. Some are actually highly compliant with the SMART framework from management theory.
In China, before heading out to sea, fishermen pray to Mazu: protect us and bring us back safely with a full catch. Run this prayer through the SMART criteria one by one, and it’s nearly perfect.
Specific: come back alive, boat full of fish.
Measurable: did the person return, how much fish, crystal clear.
Achievable: a reasonable expectation, nobody’s asking to haul in a boatload of bluefin tuna.
Relevant: fishing is their livelihood, so the catch is directly relevant.
Time-bound: this one voyage. And they pray to Mazu alone, so attribution is clean.
Praying for pregnancy works too. Either you’re pregnant or you’re not. Binary outcome, relatively clear time window.
These prayers have high “success rates” precisely because they are assessable, especially on the Achievable dimension.
But the vast majority of prayers in everyday life are nothing like this. You solemnly pray: “Let my stock portfolio double this year.” The question immediately arises: is doubling achievable? What about a 50% gain? 10%? If you prayed for a 1% return, you wouldn’t need divine help. The market will probably get you there on its own. But nobody makes a special trip to a temple to pray for 1% returns. The things truly worth praying for are the hard things. And where exactly is the line between “hard” and “unrealistic”? Who defines it? The divine won’t tell you, and you can’t tell yourself.
Pray too conservatively, and you don’t need the blessing. Pray too ambitiously, and when it doesn’t happen, you can’t say the prayer failed. The A in SMART (Achievable) is simply undefinable in the context of prayer.
Even the divine would need to conduct an impact assessment
Religion, as a sacred institution, is fundamentally oriented toward goodness. So it naturally needs to screen every prayer for moral standing.
Some prayers obviously should not be granted. If someone walks into a temple and prays “please let my Ponzi scheme survive another year,” I believe any deity would reject that filing outright. A request this clearly in violation of basic moral standards cannot pass the initial screening.
But a huge number of prayers are not black and white.
“Let me crush my competitor this year.” Good or bad? You might be winning the market with a better product, entirely legitimate. But your competitor might have hundreds of families depending on those paychecks. You win, they lose their jobs.
“Let the construction project I’m leading move forward smoothly.” But this project might involve building a factory in a residential neighborhood, with fierce opposition from local residents. Your “smooth progress” is their “disaster.”
None of these prayers are as obviously wrong as the Ponzi scheme. The person praying genuinely believes they are doing the right thing. But the consequences of each prayer involve invisible chains of interests, and whether the outcome is good or bad simply cannot be determined at the moment of praying. Even an omniscient, omnipotent deity would need to conduct a complex, systemic evaluation before deciding whether to grant the wish. This is no longer a moral judgment. This is an impact assessment.
Two temples, one wish. Who gets the credit?
Some people say: after praying at one temple, you shouldn’t visit another temple for a while.
Why? Because if you visit two temples in quick succession and make the same wish, and the wish comes true, which temple gets the credit? Don’t forget, after a wish is fulfilled, there’s still the crucial step of “returning to give thanks.” Which temple do you go back to?
Attribution cannot be split.
So people say: just stick to one temple for a period of time. Fair enough. But how long is “a period of time”? Three months? Six months? A year? The people offering these definitions obviously can’t cite any religious policy document or standard operating procedure as evidence.
If you wanted to compare which temple is more effective, you couldn’t run a controlled experiment either. Visit two temples at the same time for the same wish, and if it works, you can’t split the credit. Visit at different times for the same wish, or different times for different wishes, and you have no basis for comparison at all.
From any scientific perspective, the question “which temple is more effective” is fundamentally unanswerable.
So I don’t go
It’s not just about burning incense and praying at temples. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religions all follow the same pattern. What believers pray for comes down to the same few things: peace, health, wealth, guidance. We are all human. Regardless of skin color, language, or faith, our needs are remarkably similar. It’s just that the vast majority of everyday prayers are inherently vague and unassessable. And precisely because they are unassessable, belief systems can never be disproven.
My position remains the same. If your company’s performance system looked like this: success attributed to leadership’s vision, failure blamed on employees’ poor execution, evaluation criteria vague and shifting, achievability of targets left entirely to subjective judgment, reporting lines tangled with no clear ownership of results, I would make you redesign the whole thing.
The temple’s system, I can’t change, and I don’t want to. But at least I know why I don’t use it.
The accountability is unclear.