Serendipity isn't a brand of ice cream

but it still tastes good

(photo from Wanderlustinthecity.com)

On a warm summer evening, one’s mind can turn towards that creamy staple of cuisine, the ice cream.

And if you find yourself on Lenox Hill, in the quiet part of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, you might make the short trek to the classic Serendipity 3, which has been open since 1954. As you sit on a vintage chair and peruse the menu, it’s tough to make a decision.

Chocolate Blackout Cake? Creme Dela Creme Cream Cheese Cake?? The World’s Most Expensive Milkshake??? The mind boggles and the taste buds cry for mercy.

And where did this place come from? The original founder arrived in NYC as a teen to find his fortune. He met his future business partners in dance class, and they named the place after the thing that brought them together: Serendipity.

What is serendipity? It is defined as "the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”

But it is also a powerful force for innovation.

Serendipity is what Louis Pasteur called having a prepared kind; a mind that’s open to the unexpected, to holding back and not jumping to conclusions, and to resisting walls between domains and disciplines.

Professor Nicolas Dew describes serendipity in entrepreneurship as the intersection of three “domains” or elements: search, knowledge/preparation, and chance. He claims that an individual needs to be looking for something, such as a solution to a problem or an opportunity. She needs to approach the search with existing knowledge and preparation so that she will be able to recognize an event or information. In addition, the unexpected event or information has to emerge by chance.

Thus, according to Dew, serendipity occurs only when all three elements are present and overlap (a search, prior knowledge, and chance event).

(from Organizational Studies/SAGE Publications)

Let’s break this diagram down, and see how it works at different levels.

When we are searching for someone and have a chance event, but with no prior knowledge, we have a hunch that something has been discovered. But it’s just a hunch; we have nothing concrete to back it up.

When we have a chance event based on prior knowledge but are not actively looking for something, we get surprised. But it could be incongruent or even irrelevant to what we are doing at the time.

When we are searching for something based on prior knowledge we are mapping the desert. Which is useful, but in a systematic and predictable way.

It’s only when we combine all of these things: searching for something based on prior knowledge and encounter a chance event, that we truly have a serendipitous discovery.

So how do we cultivate serendipity?

Lawley and Tompkins’ paper on Maximizing Serendipity describes a perceptual model for this.

(from Lawley and Tompkins)

E-1: Have a mind that is prepared for the unexpected and ready to seize the moment.

E: An event that is unexpected but also has the potential for long-term value.

E+1: Someone needs to recognize this event as being potentially serendipitous.

E+2: Choosing the appropriate action to preserve and amplify the moment, and not necessarily the event itself.

E+3: Being in both the right place and the right time to turn an interesting anomaly into serendipity.

E+4: Making the value judgement to evaluate the effects in relation to a larger system.

And these are tough to train for, but we can try and practice them every time we are searching for something new and working with others.

Some everyday practices we can all do for serendipity are:

• Curiosity: Always be wondering “how” and “why?”

• Perceiving: When we encounter something out of the norm, embrace it rather than dismissing it.

• Randomness: Doing things a little differently each time. Shelf your books in random order to take advantage of opportunistic book grabbing.

• Cognitive Diversity: Find ways to think differently about things, especially with others.

• Inefficiency: Being efficient can make us more productive. But it’s the friction of inefficiency than can lead to real opportunities.

• Beginner’s Mind: Realize fully at each moment that we don’t know what will happen next.

How are you training yourself for serendipity?