Business Serendipity

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur

When opportunity knocks, are you ready to let her in? Or are you busy, doing “Very Important Things™”?

I’m yet to meet a business that doesn’t espouse innovation and a deep desire to act on opportunities as they arrive. We talk about the happy happenstance that generated huge value because of some random conversation or event.

Yet most organizations pursue efficiency, trying hard to ensure all “resources” are fully loaded and well utilized at all times. As a friend once remarked “they this heuristic, they made sure everyone was loaded to at least 120%, that way they felt confident that they’d get at least 80% done”.

But what happens when you tightly control what should be done, often inducing stress and overburdening in the process? Are there any potential casualties? Is there a cost to doing so?

You squeeze chance out, you don’t hear opportunity knocking. The first victim of busyness is serendipity.

If you’re a devotee of Saint Pareto thus believing that power laws, rather than normal distributions, govern many of the things around us you’ll quickly see how urges to reduce variance, streamline operations and ensure all time is accounted for and put “to good use”, is actually a terrible use of time.

You’ve traded away asymmetries unknown for linear effects in a world where one of the most common laments of senior executives are that in general employees takes to little risk. You’ve optimized for the known, selling away the very thing that enables the stories and happy accidents you claim to want.

If you in earnest want to optimize your business to innovate and leverage the untapped potential each individual we must begin by rethinking how we rig the game for those conversations and insights to happen.

We need to create not only arenas for people to mingle, be that company breakfasts, afternoon tea or the very Swedish fika, we must also create space in their schedules and minds to be present and open. To listen and sense opportunity when it sneaks up on them. Stressed brains are not curious, they’re intensely solution oriented.

More senior roles are often better at creating space for themselves, their networks are diverse and knowledgeable and their positional power grants them freedom to follow hunches and take action more rapidly. They have more resources to their disposal and can much easier reschedule, delegate or postpone deliveries to investigate a new path.

Innovation and out of the box thinking simply can’t flourish in a box that’s barely large enough, or even to small, to fit current obligations.

The leaders challenge thus is how to offer everyone pockets of unscheduled time, create an environment where people and ideas mix. To create the conditions which favors serendipity, to prepare the minds and spirits to not only do what’s required today but to tug at the threads of reinventing tomorrow.

To optimize your business, the very first step might be to de-optimize everyone’s schedule. The leading indicator for your ability to cultivate new ideas, to nurture change, is simply the amount of unscheduled time in the collective calendar.

In closing my friend Steve summarized it thus:

Burden makes fatigue, fatigue leads to failure

I think we’d all make ourselves a favor to keep that in mind. At all levels, starting with ourselves.

Travel lightly.