Byron's Babbles

This past week I had the opportunity to do an awesome activity with members of The Value Web at their annual gathering. We were all given the task of picking an article that we had individually read in recent months that was impactful to us. We were then instructed to send the link to the article to our facilitators the Friday before the event. Then, yesterday all the articles had been printed out and pinned to boards. Then we went on a hunting expedition to find an article (not our own) that we found intriguing and interesting. We were instructed to get into groups of six. We were then given the Read, Read, and Read Some More protocol to carry out. I have posted the protocols here: 

Of course, the article I sent in was by Peter Block and entitled, “You Are The Guest.” Click here for the link to that article. The article I picked for the activity was “Why bullshit is no laughing matter” by Gordon Pennycook. Click here to read that article.

Interestingly, in our group of six the discussion using the Talk About It protocol revolved around the idea of “bullshitting.” You can see a graphic recording of our discussion, here: 

We had a great discussion. Here are some points that really resonated with me: 

• Conversations leading to trust are more valuable than scientific knowledge leading to jargon
• Letting serendipity occur and create space is more valuable than engineered space
• Be intentional to create space for serendipity to occur
• We must build our emotional capacity to balance science and our beliefs to create space for trust
• We live in the age of information, which means we live in the age of misinformation
• It’s easy to bullshit – impress rather than inform
• For the bullshitter, it doesn’t really matter if she is right or wrong. What matters is that you are paying attention
• Many will rate sentences with buzz words as more profound than sentences with clear meaning

We also discussed how opportunities arise that we don’t consider, some objectives fall short and some exceed our wildest expectations. We spent time talking and thinking about how many times we have achieved success and realized that it is a combination of a great strategy, solid execution and serendipity. Serendipity is defined as “An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.” Pretty straight forward and I’m sure we can all think of many instances in our lives that came about in this very way.

Then we discussed the need to incorporate into your strategy a process to create and take advantage of serendipitous moments. Sounds like planning for accidents, right? We clearly cannot plan for all of the unexpected opportunities that may come our way, but what we need to do is analyze the unplanned opportunities that come out way and search for a pattern of some sort. We need to figure out the commonalities and devise a strategy that increases the chances of the random becoming less random, possibly even somewhat predictable – serendipity.
If we acknowledge that chance and circumstances beyond our control often do play a part in our success and allow ourselves to open our eyes to more opportunities whether we planned for them or not, we will create more serendipitous space.