As part of my Clore fellowship I have agreed to produce a Masters-equivalent piece of research around a particular area of ‘leadership’ that interests me.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since our first residential course, and with our next one coming up this weekend, I thought I would post what I’ve come up with so far.
Anyone following my lifestream or my Delicious feed will have noticed a lot of links to things around ’serendipity’ appearing.
I’m scoping out a possible subject for research: Does successful innovation work by enabling serendipity to occur? Can you lead by enabling more, and more valuable serendipitous encounters and events to happen within the organisation or network you are part of?
So this is a mind-map of some of my thinking, and here are a bunch of links on serendipity I’ve found so far. It seems like there’s been very little or nothing done in this area so far - is there a reason for that?
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4 Comments
Fascinating concept Stef - serendipity is like cosmic encouragement.
There’s a bit of academic work on this. In your literature review for you work you might want to touch on how science utilises the notion of serendipity in research and investigation.
Thanks guys - I was a bit concerned by the look on the face of the first academic I spoke to about this. One of them even suggested I take a look at the ’self help books’ that are available! Ha! But if you look at Google’s 20% time model, that’s pure and simple ‘enable serendipity to occur’. What could happen if more companies adopted that approach?
Dave - thanks for the links. I’d forgotten about Google Scholar and I’ve been using library searches as well as the excellent Ashridge learning resource they have online (password access only - get me!)
Ah! Serendipity! I’ve looked for it all my life, it seems, as one who regularly recommends high risk gambles in oil exploration. There is a saying oilfinders believe in - sometimes you find oil for all the wrong reasons! And this is the serendipity factor at work.
I remember a rather fatuous book “Megatrends” written in the 1980s (I may even have a copy in the attic) which simply said that Amoco found more oil because they drilled more wells. This is really a piece of nonsense but it is of course true that you will never find oil unless you drill for it. I have always thought that we should strive to find more oil with fewer wells!
The real conundrum is, of course, how to encourage serendipity to take over when everything else goes wrong with your thinking. I never thought of it as accelerated serendipity before but I think this is a damn good way of putting it.
Now one for the trivia - Serendib was the Persian name for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and it meant to them, the tropical surprise at the end of a long and tedious journey through arid southern India. In itself that is a good reminder to always invoke serendipity!