Is it possible to breakdown the drivers of serendipity to maximize our “return on attention”?
Points Unknown, Budapest, Hungary
Every day, a new article is posted about how to reduce the noise, to reduce distractions, to streamline our lives and get more work done. And every day, another distraction begs for our attention.
As decision-makers who analyze risk and reward to create action plans, we’re taught to use the “known knowns” to explore or mitigate the “known unknowns”; but often our biggest upside and downside opportunities lie in the “unknown unknowns”. Thus, how can we maximize our returns and minimize our risk from the unknown unknowns by tapping into the power of the unknown itself?
The idea of serendipity is typically used to denote the unexpected benefit that accrued from pursuing something unrelated. The examples of innovations resulting from serendipity is impressive, but lost in our definition and examples are the stories of the numerous failures and waste resulting from misallocated resources, wasted time and dead ends over-explored.
The benefit of serendipity carries the cost of inefficiency; thus, in the interest of creating better metrics to understand the equations underlying today’s economy, is it possible to breakdown the drivers of serendipity to maximize our “return on attention”
Applied to the context of online and offline networking and business development, could:
Serendipity = function of (time, past knowledge, open mind, follow up) for (writing a blog, commenting on sites, reading blogs, sharing ideas, posting public notes on social networks, listening and paying attention to other people’s public notes, going to conferences, events, meetings, speaking at events, helping connect people) **
Thinking of the components of serendipity above, how could we track our time and results from our efforts, figure out how they balance each other, determine our global and local maximizations and help us reallocate our time and efforts to each activity?
Yes, it’s a fanciful notion, but entertain the thought for a second: what variables are we missing? How could we determine the absolute or relative weight of the coefficients of each variable? How could we A/B split test serendipity?
Even without firm metrics, understanding the drivers and process of serendipity could be an important step in understanding how to tap into the power of networks, communities, social tools and collaborative platforms.
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A random thought after I posted this note: in a way, knowledge-management and CRM systems are a start toward helping us understand how to shape serendipity, but the systems are generally focused on storing stocks of information rather than tracking flows from information to actions.
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* Credit for the phrase “shape serendipity” goes to John Hagel from a note on Facebook.
** Apologies for my butchered functional notation.
