When Writing Becomes a Peregrinaggio
My new book, Authentic Serendipity—and Why We Need 21st-Century Jesters, has now been published.
Writing that sentence feels satisfying. But it is also slightly misleading.
It suggests that the person who began writing the book is the same person who completed it. I know now that he is not.
Heraclitus is often paraphrased as saying:
No one steps into the same river twice, because it is not the same river—and he is not the same person.
The familiar wording may not be exactly what Heraclitus originally said. That makes it strangely appropriate here: my book also began by questioning a familiar interpretation that generations of people had repeated without returning carefully enough to the original source.
But the river remains a powerful metaphor.
When I began this book, I stepped into one river. When I finally emerged, both the river and the person had changed.
The Freedom to Be Dominated
Jerome Bruner captured something essential about creative work in his 1962 book On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand.
He used the deliberately provocative expression:
“Freedom to be dominated” by the object being created.
At first, the creator directs the work. We have an intention, a structure and some idea of the destination. We believe the work belongs to us.
But if the emerging creation develops sufficient life and coherence, the relationship begins to change. Bruner writes:
“As the object takes over and demands to be completed ‘in its own terms’…”
He then argues that this surrender creates a new opportunity for individuality to emerge. The possibilities are no longer juggled only inside our heads. They are now “out there”—on the page, on the hand-written notes on the blackboard or inside the emerging work—where we can see them, challenge them and allow them to challenge us.
This is not the loss of creative freedom. It may be its deepest form.
To be dominated by one’s creation, Bruner suggests, is to become temporarily free from some of the defences that keep us hidden from ourselves.
That is precisely what happened while I was writing this book. I began with serendipity and Arthur Koestler’s Jester–Sage–Artist triad.
I thought I had a fascinating but relatively clear intellectual project. I was wrong.
The manuscript refused to remain inside my original plan. It began developing its own logic. New questions appeared. Old assumptions started looking fragile. Ideas I had carried for twenty years suddenly connected with ideas I had encountered only recently.
Eventually, the book began demanding to be completed on its own terms.
I did not simply write the book. At some point, the book began rewriting me.
The Anomalies That Changed the Journey
One decisive turn came when I returned to the original Peregrinaggio whose title had given Horace Walpole the name for his new word.
Like almost everyone else, I had long accepted the familiar interpretation. The Three Princes of Serendip possessed a special talent for making discoveries “by accidents and sagacity” while looking for something else.
It is an attractive story. It has inspired generations of researchers, writers and innovation experts. There was only one problem:
It does not adequately describe what happens in the original Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo, published in Venice in 1557.
Walpole’s reading was surprisingly sloppy. Even Robert K. Merton, one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished social scientists, appears to have sensed that something did not quite fit. The extensive manuscript he wrote with Elinor Barber in 1958 remained—using Merton’s own intriguing expression—“carefully unpublished” for almost half a century.
Why would a scholar of Merton’s stature leave such a meticulously researched book unpublished for so long?
That became another meaningful anomaly I could not ignore.
The Princes of Serendip Were Court Jesters
And then, as Bruner might have predicted, the creative work took over and revealed something I had not been looking for.
The Three Princes did not merely behave like jesters. In Emperor Beramo’s court, they actually served the essential function of court jesters: using wit, puns, riddles, playful provocations and strategically designed setups to expose hidden truths and influence power.
Even more importantly, they did this together. They were not three isolated geniuses making separate discoveries. They observed, reasoned and acted as a team. Their insight was collective.
The Peregrinaggio contains case after case of this collaborative, jester-like intelligence, many of which I examine in the book.
And suddenly the circle closed.
I had begun with a word supposedly derived from the Three Princes of Serendip. The journey eventually revealed that the same princes were also an overlooked model for the collective Jester archetype our organizations need today.
The story associated with the birth of serendipity had been hiding the wisdom of the Jester in plain sight for almost five centuries.
Peregrinaggio Is Not an Expedition
The old Italian title gave me another clue. Peregrinaggio does not mean an expedition.
An expedition begins with a predefined destination. Its route may be difficult, but success means arriving where the travelers originally intended to go.
A Peregrinaggio is different. It is a pilgrimage—a journey through which the travelers seek wisdom and virtue. Its deeper destination may not be visible when the journey begins.
That difference gradually became the hidden structure of my writing process.
I began by writing about serendipity => Serendipity led me to Koestler and bisociation. => Koestler led me to the Jester–Sage–Artist triad. => The Jester led me to medieval courts, where certain people were granted the rare freedom to challenge power, expose absurdity and say what others could not say.
Into the Forgotten World of the Jesters
The Three Princes would not let me stop there. At that moment, the manuscript was no longer following my original plan. The process had taken over. As Bruner described it, the emerging book was now saying:
“Now you must follow this.”
When I noticed how Three Princes of Serendip had fulfilled the function of court jesters in Emperor Beramo’s court, I needed to understand what a Jester truly was—before centuries of caricature reduced the figure to a cap, bells and shallow entertainment.
What I initially imagined might become a short bridge in the book developed into a rigorous exploration of the historical world of jesters. I followed them through European and Asian courts and across different cultures. I studied the work of scholars such as Enid Welsford, Karl Friedrich Flögel, Beatrice Otto and Dorinda Outram, as well as remarkable figures including Stańczyk, Birbal, Tenali Rama, You Meng, Mathurine, Jacob Paul von Gundling and Will Somers.
Behind their enormous diversity, a deeper pattern began to emerge.
At their best, jesters could challenge power without confronting it conventionally. They used humor, wit, ambiguity, mimicry, riddles and reversal to reveal what formal advisers could not—or dared not—say. They exposed vanity, interrupted rigid thinking and helped rulers see familiar situations from unexpected angles.
What began as a detour eventually became the forty-page third chapter of the book.
Conceptualizing the 21st-Century Jester
The process had taken over. As Bruner described it, the emerging book was next asking:
What would the Jester’s essential function look like inside a 21st-century organization?
The historical Jesters did not provide me with an already existing modern concept. Instead, their forgotten wisdom gave me the spark to conceptualize a new organizational archetype: the 21st-Century Jester—not an entertainer or organizational clown, but a constructive challenger, catalyst of creativity, weaver of meaning and conscience of the community.
Once that archetype began taking shape, it opened an even larger organizational question:
What kind of cognitive infrastructure allows people to notice anomalies, challenge stale assumptions, think together and transform insight into value?
That question eventually crystallized into the Smile in Mind framework presented in the concluding part of the book.
And that was also my chance finally return to the legacy of our netWork Oasis – the dearest of all my projects by far.
The journey began with serendipity. => It led to the Jester. => And from there, to a new way of thinking together. This was not the book I originally planned to write. It became wider, more personal and more demanding. It brought together ideas and experiences from four decades in business and more than twenty years of advocating serendipity.
It also helped me understand that my entire professional journey—from netWork Oasis and the Oasis Way of Working to Training Camps, serendipity management, platform thinking, Vucability Improvement and collective sensemaking—had been circling the same fundamental question:
Why do some organizations notice possibilities that others consistently miss?
Becoming the Person Who Could Finish It
In Los Angeles in 1997, I had a private conversation with Jim Rohn.
He said something to me that I have carried for almost thirty years:
“Ilkka, your task in this world is to become the best person you can be.”
For many years, those words could easily have sounded like a demand to accomplish more, build more, become more successful or make myself somehow bigger.
Today, I understand them differently. Becoming the best person you can be is not about becoming someone else. It is not a competition, nor is it an endless project of self-optimization.
It is a movement toward authenticity.
Writing this book made me more curious and more playful. It taught me to trust periods of solitude and spaciousness. It made me listen more carefully to anomalies instead of dismissing them as noise. It deepened my understanding of the difference between Chronos—the measured time that governs our schedules—and Kairos, the right moment in which something meaningful becomes possible.
It also made me laugh more freely at absurdity, including my own. I am not claiming that a book transformed me into “the best person I can be.” That journey would be far too easy if it could be completed by writing 320 pages. But the book became another important stage in my own Peregrinaggio.
Perhaps Jim Rohn’s message was never a destination. Perhaps it was an invitation to remain open to becoming.
The Book Is Finished. The Peregrinaggio Is Not.
A published book appears complete. It has a cover, an ISBN and its own listings in international sales channels. The sentences can no longer be moved around. The last-minute corrections must finally stop. The physical object now exists independently of its author.
When I began this book, I stepped into a river of ideas. By the time we emerged—the book and I—both the river and the person who had entered it had changed.
The writing of the book has ended, but the life of its ideas has only begun. Once readers enter the book, they will bring their own experiences, questions, disagreements, and anomalies with them.
I am sure new insights will emerge. The 21st-Century Jester archetype will be piloted in different environments. And Authentic Serendipity will reshape boardroom conversations as organizations learn to navigate the Postnormal Era.
The manuscript asked me to follow it. Now it is ready to continue its Peregrinaggio with its readers. The next chapter belongs to you.
Walk with curiosity, sagacity, and trust—and keep your senses open for Kairos. He never stays long.
May Kairos be with you.
