Last week we delivered a webinar to 75 people from a business school. The focus was on how we show up and stand out professionally in a competitive landscape.
We approached the design of the session as we always do. Capture initial thoughts and then let them ‘sit’ for a few days. This process raises your filters for material to enrich the session and it’s impact, because consciously, and unconsciously, the mind is on the lookout for hooks, themes, research – taking information on a journey to insight and ultimately wisdom. When you come back to original thoughts, you find the ideas are richer, and the process of piecing together the narrative is more intuitive.
The concept of Serendipity, described by Dr Christian Busch in his book The Serendipity Mindset as creating your own good luck, kept popping up. As it turns out, people who seem to have good luck, and resulting success and joy in life, are working on the conditions for that good luck. When unexpected triggers arise, they are ready to pick off opportunity.
They do this in two ways:
1. Through cultivating curiosity, openness, and alertness – training yourself to see opportunities and being patient with what failure can teach. Around 50% of major scientific breakthroughs emerge as the result of accidents or coincidences.
2. Creating a serendipity field to increase reach and exposure. Serendipity often emerges in social interactions. Building broad, diverse, and deep connections increases your chances of collisions.
And then the penny dropped. What if we could see building a professional online presence as laying the conditions for Serendipity, and then compounding it through expanding your surface area for luck by engaging with diverse people and ideas?
We issued this hack at the start of our session, building a professional online presence is about “Finding the networks and communities that help you thrive”.
In the words of Seneca: ‘Luck is a matter of preparedness meeting opportunity’, and Louis Pasteur: ‘Luck favours the prepared mind’.
An hour long webinar is a short time to introduce a new frame, unpack it a little, put it into practice, and give participants some space to experiment. But it is enough to invite them to see with a different lens, to throw out a hook that makes them curious about what is possible – how am I building my serendipity field online?
We share the design of this (well-received) session for two reasons. One, to illustrate that ‘dump and revisit’ technique, it’s powerful. Two, to invite you to put new frames to current challenges. Both work better when you read widely, listen to new views, connect with diverse people, and cultivate a curious mindset.
Sliding-door moments can change your life, but often pass us by. Reframing ‘luck’ might just help to prevent that.