The one where we set out to get a little lost and where lucky finds are made.
Our brains run on batteries, and given that the human brain draws a whopping 20% of the body’s total energy budget — applying conservation tactics make sense. Historically you can’t run such expensive equipment on full power all the time, so the brain constantly tries to respond immediately to sensory input using learned patterns and memories rather than to reflect and weigh different potential responses to come up with the best one. Coming up with a quick answer based on experience is not only preferred by our brains, but by our peers — we celebrate the fast decisive thinker.
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (1964)
However, if you want to invite innovation and open the door for new ideas, the fast pattern-based solution searching thinking is a treacherous friend. You will want to enter spaces where your learned patterns of explanation don’t match, it may feel awkward at first but the reward is plentiful. This is leaving the comfort zone, and there is where we develop.
Some of the most famous creative persons we know use (well, used) various tricks to escape the lure of pattern-based/algorithmic thinking, sir Alexander Fleming famously applied a way of ‘professional sloppiness’; being sloppy enough to invite the unexpected but also professional enough to be able to understand and backtrack what had happened. Other ways include trying something new every day, clicking on Wikipedias random web-page, taking a new route to work.
That is why we at the AIE love to hang out with the entrepreneurs and partners at MINC. MINC is the local incubator here in Malmö, and Thursday mornings they open up for coffee, standing breakfast, pitches and mingle. It is a very convenient and efficient way of immersing yourself in unexpectedness. You meet large global corporations like Sony alongside small startups, and not to give away any secrets … but we are very much looking forward to coffee and chats with one of the startups next week. Unplanned and unexpected as a happy coincidence should be.
A word on your way
The beautiful word ‘serendipity’ is getting thrown around more and more, and it captures the essence of inviting the unexpected. It has a soundly boring definition:
The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
However, a danish professor once described it to me as “while you are looking for the needle in the haystack, you find the farmers beautiful daughter”.
Happy hunting!
