Make Your Own Serendipity: Nine Ways to Start

Serendipity isn't just something that happens.

I was thrilled to see The New York Times start the year with this great piece, How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity. 

Super-encounterers are people who know how to engineer more serendipity in their lives. Do you know how to do that? 

Those of you who have been reading for a while know about the Imagination Age, the leadership framework I created to navigate from an Industrial Era mindset to an Intelligence Era mindset. The leaders at every large company face this challenge, because the Industrial Era was tangible and easy to understand (think engines, conveyor belts, steamships), while the Intelligence Era is full of invisible elements and products (think data, algorithms and code). This requires a new way of thinking. 

The system has twenty six core ideas, represented by the Glyphs of the Imagination Age. I developed the concepts for many years, and commissioned Oliver Uberti to illustrate them. 

One of them (shown above in the hand) is Serendipity. In 2015, Science House worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies to put various concepts in the Imagination Age into practice. My favorite was Serendipity. Hundreds of people were trained to engineer more Serendipity in their lives and careers. 

The people who are introduced to the idea get a little pamphlet during the session, and it has nine ideas in it for engineering more Serendipity.

1) Talk to people outside your industry. Go to a conference for something completely unrelated to what you do.

 2)  Read a book on a completely unfamiliar topic. 

3) Ask a lot of questions. 

4) Ask total strangers for recommendations. 

5) Invite someone from a different department to lunch. 

6) Invite someone from a completely different industry to speak to your team. 

7) Learn a new skill: cooking, backgammon, memoir writing. Something. 

8) Give a short speech (for friends, strangers or colleagues) on a topic that has nothing to do with what you do for a living. Start with beginner's mind. 

9) Surprise yourself.

I'm very serious about this last one. 

SURPRISE YOURSELF!

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If you want to learn more about the rest of the Glyphs of the Imagination Age, contact me at Science House in Manhattan. I strongly recommend bringing your team in for our new workshop, HOW MAGICIANS THINK. Follow me on Twitter: @RitaJKing.