Serendipity

I’m back! This blog has been on a hiatus ever since I started business school. For the past year, life has been on hyper-speed: adjusting to life in New York City, figuring out how to survive accounting and corporate finance, recruiting for a summer internship, and meeting a few hundred new friends and classmates. Although this dear blog has suffered, the silver lining is that after a year of new experiences and new education, I’ve many new perspectives and thoughts to share here.

In this post I want to focus on a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – Serendipity.

Most creatives and designers know about serendipity – it is that moment in the creative process when you take a left turn instead of a right, randomly or due to circumstance, and along this new path discover something you wouldn’t have otherwise. Serendipity has been repeatedly cited as a key to innovation and creativity by a number of intellectuals and business leaders. Here are a few notable ones:

“If we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.” ~ Steven Johnson, Innovation Writer

“In order to have creativity, you have to allow for dead ends to happen” ~ Christoph Niemann, Illustrator

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” ~ Steve Jobs

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” ~ Susan Sontag, Author & Philosopher

Clearly, serendipity and a willingness to get a little lost are well recognized foundations for creativity and innovation. With today’s increasing complex and squeezed global economy, creativity and innovation skills are not ‘nice to haves’ – they are necessities. Just ask some our leading economists - the task-driven, standardized jobs of the past are gone from America, sent either to cheaper labor sources abroad, or to machines and robots. The economy is changing, and we need to change with it.

These trends are leading more and more people towards careers that focus on creativity, innovation, and complex or technical problem-solving. And as more and more workforce supply rushes to these areas, the desire to standardize it is strong. For example, one of the most popular movements right now in entrepreneurship is the “Lean Start-up” – a philosophy coined by entrepreneur Eric Ries that centers on applying lean manufacturing principles (rapid scientific experimentation, validated learning, etc.) to the creativity and innovation-driven entrepreneurship process. My own business school has a course entitled “Systematic Creativity” that teaches a similar doctrine.

All of this is in many ways fantastic – if innovation and creative process can be taught and therefore learned, capital can flow to high-value ventures more often and more efficiently, the world gets more marketable innovations, and therefore more prosperity.

But what are some of the consequences of the standardization of innovation? Where does this leave serendipity?

One of the great political economists, Joseph Schumpeter, foresaw this tension and articulated it well in his prose 'Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy':

“It is much easier now than it has been in the past to do things that lie outside familiar routine – innovation itself is being reduced to routine. Technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what is required and make it work in predictable ways. The romance of earlier commercial adventure is rapidly wearing away, because so many more things can be strictly calculated that had of old to be visualized as a flash of genius”.

The truthfulness of this quote and its direct application to today’s reality struck me the first time I read it. Technological progress has indeed made it possible for teams of specialists to converge across disciplines and borders to innovate (for example, the IDEOs and Googles of the world). Technology, huge pools of customer data, and scholarly analysis have shown us how to create an environment and organizational structure conducive to the success of these teams of specialists. Thus, we reduce to routine what they do, eliminating the “magic” from entrepreneurship and innovation, and re-envisioning it as simply another enterprise functional area.

Thinking about the issue through this lens, I get worried. I worry that this approach underestimates the important role of serendipity and random connection. I worry that educational institutions and corporations, anxious to replicate this successful model of innovation, will focus on churning out specialists from an early age, and will rob students and workers of the ability to wander, to explore, to change course, to indulge in diversions outside of their specialty. And what a shame that would be, to lose our next generation of Johnsons, Niemanns, Jobs and Sontags because we were so focused on the standardization of innovation and on “the race to win the future”, as Obama has put it.

Perhaps the best way to really digest this idea is to turn inward. Our lives are riddled with serendipitous events – how often have you said to a friend, “had that unexpected event X not happened, I wouldn’t have had the fortuitous opportunity for Y!”. For me, a big pivot point happened senior year of college. As a political science major (which I chose rather randomly because of one particularly great high school history teacher), I felt sure I wanted to be a lawyer. But as chance would have it (or perhaps my tendency to focus less on studying and more on my friends and boyfriend at the time), I didn’t do so hot on the LSAT. So I didn’t apply to law school that year. But still bent on a career in policy, I applied to a prestigious government fellowship in Sacramento – I was the first runner-up, but didn’t get the position. Confused and aimless, I moved to San Francisco and applied for any job I could find. Randomly (serendipitously), a Google recruiter found my resume on Monster.com, and called me for an interview. And I can say with relative certainty that I would not be where I am today, here in New York City, at business school, thinking about innovation, and pursuing what I feel in my gut is my destined path, had it not been for that turn of events.

The power and possibility of serendipity is strong, and we’ve got to find a place for it in our schools, in our workplaces, and in our lives.