Engineering Serendipity in a Budapest Cowork
“Serendipity isn’t magic. It isn’t happy accidents. It’s a state of mind and a property of social networks — which means it can be measured, analyzed, and engineered.”*
Have you had particularly lucky, unexpected encounters in your life, opening new doors to you and eventually ending up changing your life completely?
We all would like to get more of those lucky instances and engineering serendipity is all about designing the circumstances and conditions that lead to chance encounters which bring about new ideas and breakthrough innovations.
As we are keen on putting a creative coworking community hub on the map of Budapest, we decided to dedicate our most recent meetup to designing serendipity, with the aim of answering the following paradox:
How do we bring the right people to the right place at the right time to make sure they discover something new and useful?
We wanted to capture some thoughts, experiences and ideas that others had with serendipity. But before we could get to that point, we needed to do some clarification on the term itself. Although serendipity is talked about a lot in the startup world, it turned out, there’s a whole lot of different ideas on what it means.
One of our members was kind enough to research the origins of the word itself, to find out that:
“The origin of serendipity is older than we thought. Serendip is the Persian and Urdu name for Sri Lanka / Ceylon, meaning golden island, and the story is from a 1302 book.
We translated serendipity into Hungarian as “véletlen szerencse”, which means lucky coincidence but the Hungarian translation did not help us better understand how you can increase your creativity by creating your own luck.
A NYTimes article that we shared as a recommended reading on the topic gave us a good kicking off point, with a clear ‘yes’ for a relationship between creativity and serendipity, claiming:
“Doing your best work solo can’t compete with lingering around the coffee machine waiting for inspiration — in the form of a colleague — to strike.”
Another interpretation for serendipity, was that it is an isolated instance of what we otherwise think of as ‘creative flow.’ That is, the moment an unexpected trigger causes a creative connection in one’s brain. As an example, a participant of the discussion mentioned how reading about a company in the inflight magazine while traveling to Budapest gave him an idea about expanding his business towards a new direction that he had not considered before.
We’ll continue to brainstorm and implement such triggers for our own space in Mosaik. Some of the ideas we already have included is scattering our walls and tabletops with short bios about our members, so that all of our guests know who they could potentially reach out to in order to discuss their business challenges or just to make friends over a coffee.
We are also continuing to spread the news about recent startup endeavours within our community locally in Budapest and globally. Finally we will also routinely be displaying, asking and discussing provocative trigger questions to tickle that part of your brain that often leads to an unexpected and happy connection.
Last but not least we are encouraging community members to hold their own learning circles and meetup sessions within Mosaik itself.
We’re super keen to create the conditions for serendipity happen at Mosaik, so if you’ve any other ideas, thoughts or desires on how we can foster relationships and idea exchanges in our soon-launching home, join our Mosaik Meetup groupor drop us a line any time at hello@mosaik.space.
You can also get the latest updates on our journey by signing up to our newsletter. See you soon!
*Quote from Greg Lindsay/Work Futures Institute
