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Shape Serendipity: Methods for Maximizing Productive Interactions In-person and Online, with Jack Hidary, Serial Entrepreneur and Innovation Expert
Serendipity is a very exciting phenomenon in our lives today, both online and offline. Serendipity are those chance happenings, chance encounters, those unexpected, unplanned-for kinds of things that happen that open up new opportunities for you, new opportunities personally, or new opportunities for your corporation. What many people don’t realize is that, actually, you have the ability to increase your serendipity. You have the ability to control how much serendipity you actually encounter.
Methods for Maximizing Productive Interactions In-person and Online
The Basic Principle
Think about a diamond, and the more faces that a diamond has the more valuable it has. You can do the same thing with yourself. If all you have is only one kind of interface with the world, that is, you interface with everything via the tech knowledge that you have, well, you’re going to be limited in your life to that particular interface. But, in point of fact, if you decide to open up new interfaces where suddenly you have the ability to interface on a tech area, on an arts area, other kinds of areas, at these new interfaces, you’re going to have a much richer life, both corporate and personal.
In-person Encounters (EXTERNAL): The Art of Conference Crashing
When it comes to our physical space, there’s many, many ways to actually increase the level of your serendipity, to actually influence the amount of serendipity you’re going to encounter in your physical life.
One example I call conference crashing. This is something that everyone can do, everyone can try. It’s really, really fun, and it can lead to all kinds of crazy experiences. For example, in your own city where you are living, or if you’re traveling to another city for business or for pleasure, find out what conferences are happening that have nothing to do with your area of expertise, nothing to do with your work, nothing to do with your current hobbies and interests. So for example, you might find that there’s a medical conference happening locally. Or you might find that there’s a scuba diving equipment conference happening in the hotel that you’re staying at in Orlando to take your family to Disney World. Just the fact that it’s not your area of expertise and not your particular job doesn’t mean that you can’t attend that particular conference.
So what you want to do is go ahead and try to get into the conference. Often, there is some kind of guest pass or ways to get in there, and once you’re there, what you find is that everyone is speaking some shamanistic language. What I call the people who attend these conferences on a regular basis, these trade conferences, these industry conferences, I call them “the shamans” or “the priests.” These are the folks who have been in that industry for 10, 20 years. If it’s the film industry, they talk about gross and net and points and all kinds of things. If it’s the mining industry, they talk about all kinds of things related to mining. They have their own jargon, their own patois.
Initially, for the first few hours certainly, and maybe even for the first day, it’s going to appear like you’ve landed on Mars. These are folks that appear human, yet, are speaking a completely different language and are concerned about all kinds of things. But it’s the very fact that you’re an outsider that gives you an advantage. The very fact that you’re an outsider, you can see their problems in a new way. I’ve come up with many business ideas for my startups by attending such conferences that are outside my realm all together, because they’re inside the thicket. They can’t really see the big, big forest in terms of how to maybe solve their problem in their industry with a solution from a different industry. You may be coming from the tech area. You may be coming from the medical area. And then you go into a different industry and you can apply the solutions from your industry to their problems. And so, just by crossing into these new boundaries in these new areas, you can often find great new ideas. That’s been a proven tactic for me.
What most people do is they follow directions. They go to a conference. They see the agenda and they attend panel after panel, session after session, keynote after keynote. My advice to you is, don’t follow directions. Most of the panels are going to be pretty much worthless. You can’t really say much on a public panel. So, go off-piste. Find ways to interact with people outside of those sessions. In fact, what I personally do is I find out who’s going to be at that conference and set up four to six different coffees a day, different little meetings a day, so that I know that I’m going to sit down for 15 or 20 minutes each with people that are outside my realm, people that I may not see on a regular basis.
If there is a conference that you attended that has work-shopping, that actually has the idea of working in small groups, then definitely attend those parts of the conference. Work-shopping is always going to be more interesting to people than panel sessions and keynotes and things like that. It’s really those one-to-one interactions, small group interactions, that’s really what you want.
In-person Encounters (INTERNAL): Visioneering Exercises
One of the things I’m obsessed with is the opportunity for breakthroughs. I believe that we can imagine a future today and actually bring that future forward. We can actually accelerate our ability collectively, as a nation, as a world to actually bring a better future forward. But that requires us going outside of our routine because, by definition, our routine will lead us to that future just on a lock step basis. If we want to change that pacing, if we want to, essentially, create a time machine that brings that future forward, we’ve got to go outside of our routine. We’ve got to meet and sit down with people and have interactions with people that are not part of our core sector.
One of the organizations that I’m quite involved with is called the X Prize Foundation. At X Prize, the goal is to offer up multimillion dollar prizes, sometimes up to 10 or 20 million dollars per prize, for a set of competitors to go after a huge challenge, a huge goal, and break through that barrier. We do something every year called visioneering. We get together in one room, 60, 70 of not only the smartest people in the world but the people most open and most eager for innovation and breakthroughs. These are folks that some of them know each other, but many of them do not. Many of them come from different sectors. Some come from ocean analysis, others from space exploration. We have astronauts in the room. We have folks in the room who are doctors and medical professionals. We have folks who are entrepreneurs and techies and geeks. We bring them in. We serve them really good food. We lock the door for 48 hours. Nobody can leave. We are in there together, in a tank as it were, and we’ve got to interact in new kinds of ways to come up with, not only what are some breakthroughs, but what are areas of challenge that are just at the edge of human grasp. If you think about that image of Michelangelo of the human reaching out to the godly sphere, what are those things that are just beyond our grasp right now, that if we have a great incentive and a program, we can get people towards?
We know that we get what we bonus. We get what we measure. In companies, we obtain what we incentivize. And today, too often bonus structures and incentive structures focus really only on these kinds of things like revenue and profit. Those are good things, definitely, to incentivize. But, the question is, if you don’t incentivize and bonus innovation, if you don’t have a bonus structure for new kinds of ideas and new pathways, will you ever get it? Probably not.
And so what I would encourage you, the CEO, the founder, the entrepreneur, the next time you ask yourself, “Why don’t we have more innovation at the company?” You may want to look at that bonus structure, and say, “Are we just bonusing the day-to-day kinds of activities?” Yes. Let’s keep some of that. But maybe, instead of that being 100 percent of the bonus structure, let’s make that 80 percent or 70 percent, and let’s keep 20 or 30 percent for a new kind of bonus, a bonus that recognizes breakthrough new pathways for the company, experiments. Some experiments might fail; some might succeed. That’s okay. But if you can bonus that, you will get results that are far beyond anyone’s imagination.
Online Encounters: Stand Out Amidst the Noise
We are living in unprecedented times. We have the opportunity to reach out and connect with all kinds of people out there. Now with more than 5 billion people either on the internet directly or with mobile phones, so one of the questions in this kind of world is, how do you increase your chances of meeting the kinds of people you want to and connecting with them? How do you increase your serendipity online? There are several things you can do.
First off, what I say is, put out a number of beacons. What is a beacon? A beacon are the kinds of things that you might find, for example, floating in an ocean. So the NOAA, or the Oceanographic Services or a lighthouse or various other places, might put out beacons that tell various boats where this location is. It might send them GPS information. But we can now put out beacons ourselves, personally, in the online world. A beacon might be a blog post. It might be a picture on Instagram. It might be a comment that you make on someone else’s post. Putting yourself out there with these various beacons allow you to be discovered in new ways.
Now, if you just keep your beacons to your own sector, your own discipline, well, that’s probably what you’re going to get back. But if you start exploring other kinds of websites out there and leaving beacons out there, saying that, “Well, that’s a very interesting thing in the healthcare sector,” even though it’s not your sector, and you put out a beacon in the healthcare sector, someone might discover you from the healthcare sector and connect with you from that sector. You might go on site that discovers new ways of applying the arts to business and you might put out a beacon there. You might put a blog post there. You might guest blog on someone else’s blog, put out a beacon. If all you do all day is blog on your own blog, well yeah, people who know you, that’s great. How about people who don’t know you? So putting out beacons is really, really important.
The second thing we can do in the online world that really wasn’t possible in the offline world, is the power of marketplaces. I don’t just mean NASDAQ and buying and selling shares and things like that. But now there are marketplaces in so many other disciplines. For example, 99 Designs, this is a website you can go to. If you have an idea for a new company or a new initiative and you want a logo for that initiative, you need graphics for that initiative, you can put your idea out onto that website, and you can ask 99—and now actually, it’s way more than that; it’s thousands of different designers—to actually compete for you and come up with new kinds of logos and designs for that.
I use these kinds of systems. I’ve found, for example, an outfit in Mexico, that is not in Mexico City, is not in any major city in Mexico. They’re in a small rural town in the middle of nowhere in Mexico. They are seven people and they produce fantastic web and graphical work. I’ve used them now for five years. I have never met them before. I’ve never met them since. I’ve never physically met them face-to-face. I’ve introduced them, referred them more than 25 times to other companies, who now use them for graphics and web work. And again, we’ve never met in person. This kind of serendipity where I found them through this crowdsourcing kind of site, allowed me to have new resources and interactions that otherwise would not be possible.
So one, the use of beacons; number two, the use of crowdsource and competitive marketplaces, I think, is very, very exciting.
Finally, I would really encourage you to think about the power of weak links. A study was done on where most people got their new jobs from. And it turns out their new jobs, the recommendations for where that next job is and referrals for those new jobs, did not come from their strong links. You might think intuitively that your next job is probably going to come from a close friend of yours. A close friend might say, “Oh, you’re out of work. You’re looking for work, or you’re looking for a new idea. I know somebody and go talk to them.” But in fact, most cases are from people you don’t know that well because, in the case of people you know very, very well, and you’re very, very close with, you and they probably share the same common set of opportunities. But in the case of people who are little bit removed from you, these weaker links, they know of all kinds of other opportunities that you are not aware of. If you are aware of it, you just go after it yourself. These folks are aware of other kinds of things out there.
And so, when people go to LinkedIn, when they go to Facebook, often they’re always focused on really just their core, core set of friends. That’s great in terms of sharing stories and baby pictures, and all kinds of great stuff like that. But in terms of opening up yourself to serendipity and the kinds of things that can lead to a richer life, I would also really focus on these weaker links, the kind of person that you’re not really that familiar with who’s on LinkedIn, maybe you met them once at a conference long ago. Find out what they’re up to. Reach out to that person, not just your typical set of 30, 40 close friends. That will lead to greater serendipity.