Is Serendipity Serendipitous?

Abstract

Serendipity may not be as serendipitous as we believe when we take into account the odds of some unexpected event happening, even if not the particular event that does happen. Consider, for example, the frequency of chance encounters that can lead to opportunities when attending a conference. Therefore, rather than being surprised by serendipity, we should expect it, and thus manage it, for example, by spending less time on e-calls and more time around the coffee machine, where serendipity can flourish.

There is not nearly enough playfulness in the management journals, this one excepted. Serendipity can be, not only playful, but consequential, in organizations that manage it playfully.

Serendipity connects dots, unexpectedly and fortuitously—for example, to have come up with post-it notes and penicillin pills. The former made use of a glue that was thought too weak to be useful, and the latter resulted from recognizing the potential of a mold that had killed bacteria in a research sample.

But is serendipity truly serendipitous? In other words, do the dots connect themselves, through luck, by chance? Or is there more to it? I believe there is more to it, and so discuss below why serendipity can actually be expected, and thus managed.

Expect Serendipity

Yuki and Yumi bump into each other on a street in Yonkers. They know each other in Yokohama, but they never met there in quite the same way. It is love at this site. What an unexpected, fortuitous coincidence, they marvel, such serendipity! Back home, they tell the story of the manner of their meeting to everyone in sight, even people they hardly know. Imagine if Yuki had walked down the next street, or Yumi had left her hotel five minutes later.

On the other hand, maybe one of them would have bumped into someone else they know, on the next street or in the next week, serendipitously if not necessarily romantically. They do, after all, know many people. Put differently, while the odds of one serendipitous event may be low, the odds of any one of the possible serendipitous events is not. Serendipity is more likely than we imagine.

“Love at first sight” has to be, if not the most common form of serendipity, certainly the most venerated. We just love to glorify such things. Had Yuki or Yumi met some other love of their life one street over or five minutes later, or in Yokohama weeks later, they might have shared that event just as proudly. For some people, after all, it can be love at almost any sight.

Everyday Serendipity

This article was conceived when I was invited to make the summary comments at a panel on serendipity at the annual conference of the Academy of Management. ¹ There, the day before the panel, I had a meeting with my publisher about my new book, Understanding Organizations…Finally! We discussed the possibility of creating an instructor's guide to help professors adopt it as a textbook, but we weren’t sure how to proceed, other than wondering who might author it.

That evening, when I took the elevator to my room on the 25th floor, in came a woman who hit the button for the 24th floor, plus a guy who was to get off in between. The woman said to me, “I really like your new book.” When I replied, “You read it already?” she said they were adopting it as a textbook. So here came the “elevator pitch”: in the floors we had left, I suggested that she might want to help us with the instructor's manual. When she responded positively, I managed to dig out a card with my email address before we arrived at the 24th floor. Serendipitously, we were on the 24th and 25th floors instead of the fourth and fifth floors, also that the third person in the elevator gave us a few more seconds.

True, this was not an earth-shattering event, nothing like penicillin. But it was serendipitous nonetheless, at least potentially so. In fact, I figure that about five other similar events happened at that conference—chance encounters that could have led to something interesting. Yes, five. The fact of the matter is that serendipity is rather common, especially at conferences like this one: with more than 10,000 attendees, the possibilities were endless.

Indeed, isn’t this a main reason why we go to such conferences? They are serendipity conferences—places to expect fortuitous chance encounters. Better to walk the halls than attend the presentations. Otherwise, you might return home disappointed, reporting to your colleagues: “Such a lousy conference: no serendipity!”

Now let's go back to penicillin, which was not quite as serendipitously discovered as usually reported. Alexander Fleming returned to his laboratory after some time away, discovered mold in the bacteria of a research sample, and threw it out. Then a colleague reminded him that earlier, under similar circumstances, he had recovered such samples and made use of them. So Fleming did so again, and this time, invented penicillin. Is the second time around likewise serendipitous?

What Really Matters?

Let's go back to the Yuki and Yumi story, too, to consider this question: is all this only about serendipity? Couples, as noted, relish telling the serendipitous stories about the manner of their meeting. Ask almost anyone with the least romantic streak (i.e., ask almost anyone), and you may well hear an enthusiastic story: so proud of their meeting, they have to tell everyone. Let me tell you a couple of stories when I was that someone.

Warren called. I hadn’t seen him for years. He was coming to town and wanted me to meet Grace, his wife of a few months. At dinner, Grace turned out to be just that. They were engaged to be married way back, Warren explained, but he got cold feet and walked out four days before the wedding. Thirty years later, coming out of a brief second marriage, he called her up—he would be in town and proposed lunch. They met, but she was “cold,” he said. Some months later, however, having reflected on her own marriage, Grace called him up, and now here they were.

If this convinces you that the manner of meeting matters, hear out Jonathan's story. We were hiking in the English Lake District when I asked him, ever so nonchalantly, “How did you meet Susanne?” “Well, I was hiking out of a convent in Tibet, my head shaved,” he began. It got better. On the way, he met a Nepalese friend who introduced him to his German girlfriend, who, Jonathan reported, had a head full of blond hair. Three months later, he reached New Delhi and went to see his own girlfriend. She was sharing a room with that same German woman, same head of blond hair.

Four years after that, Jonathan sailed a yacht into the Mediterranean Sea, and stopped at a small Spanish port. A friend there suggested he stay at a small stone house in the hills, since the owner was away. A few days later, the owner returned—she had a head full of blond hair—and Jonathan slept outside. “Don't I know you from somewhere?” he asked her the next day. But she, having sworn off men for life after having just ended a difficult relationship, told him what she thought of that hackneyed line. Jonathan persisted, however, naming places he had been, and when he got to India, they remembered the first two meetings.

About to head out alone on the Mediterranean, Jonathan asked Susanne if she would like to join him. She wasn't sure, she said. But a couple of days later, she decided to go (sensing then, she reported later, that she was going to marry this man).

Six weeks after that, in the midst of a horrendous storm, Susanne informed Jonathan that she thought she was pregnant. Just then, to continue exactly as Jonathan told their story, the mast came crashing down. “As it was the only phallic symbol on the boat, I took this as an omen and decided to marry her” (she turned out not to have been pregnant; six years later, they had their first child).

So, is it the manner of meeting that matters? Maybe. Maybe sometimes. But think back, all you romantics. We don't even know how Warren and Grace first met, and we do know that she was “cold” the second time. Jonathan and Susanne didn't even remember the first time they met, head of blond hair and all. So what is going on? You see, it may not just be about the manner of meeting. What really matters can be the memory of the moment. And not just in love: in corporate cultures as much as in human relationships. Here are two such stories.

The story is told at Hewlett-Packard (now HP) about people lining up to make copies at one of the earliest photocopying machines. Each person was supposed to write down the number of pages they used and their name. One man fiddled with the machine and couldn’t get his copies, so he walked away. A woman in the line called him back, to tell him that he had to sign his name like everyone else and list how many pages he wasted. He did so, with the name, David Packard. The woman he chanced to meet that day eventually became a senior executive at Hewlett-Packard.

“Is the story true? Normally, this might matter, at least to publish an article such as this. But for HP, what really matters is the memory of the moment. Stories about moments such as these often form the foundation for robust cultures—the likes of the “HP Way” (as specified in 1975, the first three points were: believe in people, respect and dignity, and recognition).

The other story is about IKEA, as reported on their own website—which doesn’t mean it's exactly true, although likely so. Someone working at IKEA had to put a table in his car to take it to a photoshoot. It didn’t fit, so he took off the legs. Then came the strategic moment that changed IKEA, and the furniture business, forever: in effect, “If we have to take the legs off, so do our customers!” Flatpack (unassembled) furniture proved to be of enormous help to both the company and its customers, by saving money in production and facilitating convenience in distribution. The moment led to the new strategy, and the memory of the moment led IKEA to enhance its corporate culture.

Managing Serendipity

Since this is a management journal, we must discuss the management of serendipity.

Wherever a manager experiences a chance encounter—something unexpected, whether meeting a person, hearing an idea, bumping into something else unexpectedly–serendipity can rear its playful head. Managers should, therefore, not only expect unexpected encounters, but also predispose themselves to finding them, and exploiting them, for example, having a business card handy when taking an elevator, as many no doubt do.

Some companies, such as 3 M (creator of the post-it notes), might be seen as serendipitous enterprises, set up to exploit unexpected discoveries. They encourage their people to be mindful at all times. Likewise, many entrepreneurs might be seen as serendipitous panthers, ready to spring at the first sign of an opportunity. Their stories are often ones of unexpected learning through astute perception. Great entrepreneurs are, after all, masters at connecting the dots.

Serendipity flourishes when people and their organizations are open, opportunistic, and perceptive. They ask “Why not?” not “Why?” With communityship superceding leadership, strategies are allowed to emerge through learning, anywhere in the organization, instead of having to be planned formally at some “top.”

Thus, for the sake of serendipity, vacate office and home. Too much of contemporary management discourages serendipity. Don’t expect chance encounters where “leaders” sit in their offices, pronounce strategies, deem measures of performance, and then read the resulting financial statements. Remote-control managing is not playful.

Likewise, COVID has done a number on serendipity. With so many people working at home, post-COVID, expect less serendipity. At work, much of it happened at the coffee machine. Did you ever encounter someone at a coffee machine after a Zoom call? The very fact of working at home can thus undermine all the fancy theories about innovation. Better to leave home, and an isolated office, to get lucky.

Build the culture of your organization with the memory of the moment. As noted in the IKEA story, serendipity can prove to be strategic, and as in both the IKEA and HP stories, the memory of the moment can help build the culture of an organization. People who don’t get involved with legs on tables are less likely to come up with consequentially serendipitous insights—however small these may appear first. The same can be concluded about organizations whose people don’t listen to each other's stories. Great organizations, on the other hand, develop where everyone feels free to imagine, and share each other's insights.

So, please, recognize serendipity as less serendipitous than you might expect, to get more of it, and thus function more effectively and live more mirthfully. Small, unexpected happenings can have huge consequences on organizations, on lives, and even on societies. Finally, please tell everyone you know about this article, especially those who don’t expect it.