How to ‘Respect Serendipity’ and ‘Get Lucky’

I’ve recently started a guest blog series) on Finnish-born IIkka Kakko’s serendipity blog (www.respectserendipity.com). In it, I talk about my research so far as part of the SerenA project. I like the blog, not only because IIkka really does seem to ‘respect serendipity’ as a philosophy to life, but also because he’s developed a management approach to serendipity called ‘serendipity management’ that appreciates the value of serendipity in organisational settings. In a recent blog post, IIkka warns that it is all too each to get ‘trapped’ in mindsets and personal routines that shut us off from potential serendipitous experiences. I think we’ve all fallen into these traps at some point in our lives; being too busy to be able to seize an opportunity that might well have been useful for us, looking at our smartphones whilst in a rush somewhere only to have potentially missed something or someone important in our environment.

In this blog post, I wanted to share some of the ways that IIkka suggests that organisations can open themselves to serendipity. I would argue that many of these ways can be incorporated by individuals too. They are:

1. Keep your calendar serendipitous –> mark ”SS” (serendipity slots) randomly to your calendar one month in beforehand.
2. Keep your vision clear and fresh, commit to the vision not to the route how to get there
3. Keep on planning, but don’t make plans – > no plans to follow, but put a lot of emphasis of being prepared for the unexpected.
4. Be aware of your mixture of strong and weak ties and structural holes in your network -> too many strong ties will increase your responsibility and dependance and lead to overactivity.
5. Keep a relaxed mind and understand the difference between ”to concern” and ”to worry” – be concerned about things you are able to change, don’t worry anything else.

These aren’t the only suggestions for opening one’s self up to serendipity. In their book ‘Get Lucky,’ Thor Muller and Lane Becker make several suggestions (again aimed at organisations, but potentially useful for individuals too). They describe an approach called ‘planned serendipity.’ They suggest that “even if we can’t predict it, we can court it and prepare for it, so that we know what to do with it when it shows up” (p.8). Their approach involves harnessing 8 skills to prepare for serendipity:

1. Motion – finding ways to consistently meet new people and have new ideas.
2. Preparation – linking together seemingly unconnected people, information and events.
3. Divergence – recognising and exploring alternative paths highlighted by chance encounters.
4. Commitment – choosing the right opportunities to focus on.
5. Activation – developing constraints that release people from rote behaviour (i.e. the opposite of keeping employees ‘on task’ all the time).
6. Connection – optimising the quality and quantity of connections with others.
7. Permeability – developing tools and techniques to facilitate information exchange and the development of valuable business relationships.
8. Attraction – bringing the other 7 skills together to ‘draw’ valuable opportunities towards us.

I’d be interested in hearing whether you’ve actively encouraged yourself to follow any of IIkka’s or Thor and Lane’s approaches for harnessing serendipity. Have you tried any of these approaches? Have they worked? If not, what’s stopping you? Are there any that you think might be particularly useful for you to try to follow? Why?