Structured Serendipity | Jason Zweig

When we look back at many of the most creative people in history, including Nobel laureates, they seem to operate in a completely different way. They pursue curiosities, sometimes purposely not thinking of immediate applications. They embrace serendipity. At certain points in their career, they were even considered aimless or seen as lazy under-per... See more

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective

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Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.

Curious people take risks, try things out, allow themselves to get productively distracted. They know that something they learn by chance today may well come in useful tomorrow, or spark a new way of thinking about an entirely different problem. The more unpredictable the environment, the more important a seemingly unnecessary breadth and depth of

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With more remote and hybrid work, I think we probably have to be more thoughtful about creating connections — to new people and new ideas. I don’t think it means we can’t do it, but perhaps we can’t rely on water-cooler or photocopier serendipity to the extent we might have in the past.

Perhaps we can use tactics like the “Monday Notes” NASA employ... See more