Increasing Luck Surface Area: Let People Indulge in Their Curiosities

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Increasing luck surface area involves encouraging people to combine existing ideas into novel combinations, which often leads to significant innovation. Allowing individuals to indulge in self-indulgent activities, explore their curiosities, and pursue hobby projects can create situations where they thrive and contribute their best. Embracing weirdness and encouraging individuals to lean into their unique interests and hobbies can lead to the discovery of interesting combinations and cool ideas.

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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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