The world is full of mystery — and so are the ways chance events intertwine with our wandering thoughts across the flow of time. Nowhere have I felt this more strongly than during the process of writing my upcoming book. As I’ve been piecing together decades of experiences, insights, and encounters, I’ve come to see just how profoundly the unexpected can shape a journey.
The idea to write a book collecting my legacy of 20 + years of consulting around science park development, serendipity research and Postnormal Era thinking was ignited by chance. The basic idea incubated in my mind for several years but the trigger was re-reading Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece The Act of Creation (1964). I had received it as a gift from a person, who I met by chance and we shared ideas and tried to develop some common business ideas for a certain period of time before our paths departed. At that time I was busy with my own small consultancy bisnes, and I had not time and cognitive capacity to read the Koestler’s book throughly, so I missed the message and the connections I could have made. When organising our ‘moving house’ project, I stumbled into this book again and re-read it a year ago and this time it really resonated. I knew that now it’s the time. Now it’s the time to gather my thoughts and document them to new generations, to write that book.
Now, you may wonder what on earth has this table above to do with this? Never mind –”Not all who wonder are lost” – is a slogan I created as a working theme and leading tone for my book. The book titled ”Serendipity Unleashed – Hidden Wisdom of the Jesters” is now in final stages and out in November 2025. I have an assignment with a US based publishing house, and it will guarantee a global reach for the book, which is elementary because the topic seems to be at the moment a niche, but gaining momentum rapidly.
The table on top will be explained in the book, but because it describes the way I worked, and what I have advocated for almost two decades now, I clarify it here. I created a term ’serendipity management’ to describe how the development process of break-through ideas and innovations is best to organise. It’s a direct lesson from our netWork Oasis – project, where we created 2003-5 a revolutionary concept first called Etätyökeidas (Oasis for remote work), but along the way changed the name to netWork Oasis, where netWork was a symbol similar to mWork which at that time started to gain popularity. However, we wanted to highlight that work in future (NOTE: 2003 onwards) will be organised through interNET and the key to success was NETworking, the chance encounters of diversity of people. And that all was before nobody knew a term ‘coworking space’, even the term was not coined that time.
Now my point. I first time presented this table already 2007 in a keynote within IASP World Conference in Barcelona with an academic paper presented in proceedings. Then I repeated these presentations yearly in many other forums. When on stage, I had overall a positive response, however also opponents entered the scene and counter-arguments like ”this is oxymoron, serendipity can’t be managed” were heard. That didn’t bother me because I had logical explanations (more in my book), so I continued, and my message got more gravity when I introduced the term Postnormal Era around 2013 (originally coined by Stowe Boyd, thanks for a great notion!). The world was rapidly diving into volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) era, and the urgent need for serendipity management accelerated.
Now we come to the book project. Many times during the years people were in discussions asking where is serendipity management implemented, how can you validate this etc. And fair enough, it was 18 years ago maybe too revolutionary – even though now urgently needed in our society, business context and communities. While doing my preparations and research for the book, I found an intriguing case, which proves that, indeed, serendipity management principles have been applied long ago – and with great success – and then forgotten.
And fair enough, it was 18 years ago maybe too revolutionary – even though now urgently needed in our society, business context and communities.
Let’s wind our clocks – or in fact calendars – more that 70 years back, to early 1950’s and to General Electric Laboratories. Irving Langmuir, the hero of our story, worked there as a long time associate to Willis Whitney, they were both the most prominent advocates within business world for serendipity in times, when the notion itself was circulating only in small circles of collectors, literary scholars, lexicographers and social scientists like Robert K. Merton and his associates. Merton himself researched the diffusion of serendipity and wrote a book The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity in late 50’s about it, but he didn’t publish it until just before his death in 2003. I found this GE story from Merton’s book during my desktop research. The mysterious reasons for a late publication will be revealed in my book.
G.E Research Laboratory was a place where serendipity management really flourished. The managers like Willis Whitney and especially Irving Langmuir were enthusiastic of serendipity – respected it – and created an environment where it flourished! A direct quote from Merton’s book” Dr. Whitney used to come around every day and see every man in the laboratory and ask him:”Are you having fun today?”. And they were all having fun.” Merton describes how Willis encouraged Langmuir to focus his research to topics that mainly interested him but were somehow connected to GE’s bisnes as well. Langmuir’s statement: .. ”you can organise a laboratory so as to increase the probabilities that things will happen here. And in doing so, keep the flexibility, keep the freedom. That’s what freedom is for. All of us in this Research are interested in freedom. We know that in true freedom we can do things that could never be done under planning.”
” Dr. Whitney used to come around every day and see every man in the laboratory and ask him:”Are you having fun today?”.
The article published in The Lamp (standard Oil trade publication) explained. ” Langmuir deliberately nurtures serendipity by never setting himself a specific goal”. and continues in a moment ” (according to Langmuir) Discovery cannot be planned. But we can plan work that will lead to discoveries.” Later on Langmuir states (according to Merton) ”Another thread that goes through it all is this very idea of planning; as to whether planning is always successful in accomplishing results; as to whether or not there are definite relations of cause and effect. If there are definite relations of cause and effect and you can see the effect produced by a given cause, then of course we should go ahead and plan. But suppose in some cases there is no relation of cause and effect. Then planning does not get us very far. All we can do is, like serendipity, put ourselves into a favorable position to profit by unexpected occurrences”.
Langmuir describes this dualism in science as the difference between “convergent” and “divergent” phenomena:
“We must recognize convergent phenomena where the behavior of the system can be determined from the average behavior of its component parts. The fluctuating details of the individual atoms average out giving a result that converges to a definite state corresponding to a natural law.
There are also phenomena in which a single discontinuous event, which may originate from a single quantum change, becomes magnified in its effect so that the whole behavior of the system does depend upon a chain reaction that started from a very small beginning. These we may call divergent phenomena.”
Langmuir’s understanding of serendipity, his lifelong advocacy for it, and his experience in creating environments within GE Research Labs, where it could truly flourish are remarkable. Combined with his insight into the difference between convergent and divergent phenomena, they offer a powerful lens for today’s world.
Convergent systems are predictable and stable — ideal for planning, process optimization, and incremental improvements. But serendipity lives in the divergent realm, where a single unexpected event can set off a chain reaction leading to breakthroughs no one could have planned. In these conditions, rigid structures and command-and-control management simply don’t work — flexibility, openness, and connectivity are essential.
The table at the beginning of this article illustrates this shift: moving from closed, fixed projects toward open, evolving journeys where exploration and collaboration take center stage. These were the guiding principles of our netWork Oasis project more than 20 years ago, and today they are more relevant than ever. Langmuir and his colleagues at G.E. Research Laboratory understood this already in the 1950s, when they fostered a workplace built on freedom, curiosity, and playfulness — an environment where serendipity could naturally emerge.
Langmuir and his colleagues at G.E. Research Laboratory understood this already in the 1950s, when they fostered a workplace built on freedom, curiosity, and playfulness — an environment where serendipity could naturally emerge.
This is the essence of serendipity management: not about controlling the unexpected, but about respecting it and preparing for it. It’s about creating the right conditions so that diverse people and ideas can intersect, allowing the unexpected to be recognized and amplified.
In our unpredictable Postnormal Era, this approach has shifted from a competitive advantage to an urgent necessity. As we step further into this new reality, our challenge is clear: design organizations, ecosystems, and communities that embrace uncertainty and discovery.
That is how we unlock hidden potential, harness collective creativity, and ultimately unleash serendipity.
