How to Foster a Serendipity Culture in an Organization

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Sally Kohn: One of the aspects here of creating a really effective organization is allowing serendipity to occur. She says if you have such strong top-down controls where everyone's been told what to do, you miss out on opportunities for new ideas or unknown unknowns that take an organization in good direction. Kohn: It's just not fully possible to align the incentives perfectly. You can stochastically increase the likelihood of miracles by doing things like novelty search and getting to know different people across the company.

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Why do organizations get slower as they grow? What can organizations learn from slime molds? What are the advantages of top-down organization versus bottom-up organization, and vice versa? How can organizations encourage serendipity? What use are doorbells in jungles? Why is it so hard for organizations to set a "north star" that is at once plausible, coherent, and good?

Alex Komoroske has over a decade of experience in the tech industry as a product manager focusing on platform- and ecosystem-shaped problems. While at Google, he worked on Chrome's Web Platform PM team, Augmented Reality in Google Maps, and Ambient Computing. He's fascinated by how to navigate the emergent complexity within organizations to achieve great results. You can find some of his public writing at komoroske.com.

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