The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck
Christian Busch
384 pages, Riverhead Books, 2020
In a fast-changing world, many of the strategies, tools, and mindsets that we grew used to do not work anymore. Our tendency to simply plan and map out the future does not do justice to the complexities and intricacies of many societal and environmental issues. It requires us to develop a mindset that leverages uncertainty and the unknown as a pathway to innovation, impact, and “smart luck.”
How can we set ourselves up for this “smart luck,” to be able to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes, in even the most challenging of contexts? These are some of the questions that The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck aims to answer.
The following edited excerpt from Chapter 3: The Open Mind, highlights an example of this approach, and how reframing situations via bricolage (“making the best out of what is at hand”) can foster hope and (social) innovation.
The organization that I studied for the last five years, Reconstructed Living Labs (RLabs), provides an interesting example of how innovative community-driven solutions can be developed by locals, for locals, in the most challenging of conditions. However, while this approach has been successful in reaching hundreds of thousands of people in resource-constrained settings, it does need to go hand in hand with tackling structural inequality.—Christian Busch
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RLabs began in Bridgetown, part of Cape Town’s Cape Flats district. The area was characterized by run-down houses and high crime rates. To identify the community’s needs for emotional support, a team of Bridgetown residents under the leadership of RLabs’s founder Marlon Parker developed a network using mobile phones to connect people who needed counseling with other local people. Over time, RLabs increasingly helped the community to work with the few existing resources available to them, and developed simple training modules that allowed them to teach one another to use social media in positive ways, for example to share their stories with online audiences and to connect with like-minded people around the world.
RLabs’s headquarters now consists of a training center that provides affordable courses on how best to use social media and related subjects, an enterprise incubator that helps to start up and support new companies, and a consulting arm that focuses on advising companies and governments on issues such as how to engage local communities. Often, organizations complement their own services with components of RLabs’s approach and integrate it in to their respective locations—they form a new “hub.” RLabs’s simple education and training model now operates in over twenty locations around the world, educating tens of thousands of people. The organization uses recombining material resources (e.g., using abandoned garages as training centers) and talent (e.g., integrating people who were formerly regarded as unskilled) to empower locals.
Marlon Parker grew up in Cape Town during the apartheid era, when gang membership and crime were on the rise owing to his community’s high unemployment rates and the social inequality they faced. Raised by a single parent, and with a younger brother who was involved in a local gang, he was inspired to study information technology in college to improve his life. Marlon started teaching fellow students about computers as soon as he learned how to use one himself, and used the money he made to support his family. Marlon realized both that community members in the Bridgetown area had lost hope that life could be turned around, and that those people already possessed the solutions to many of their problems but did not know it.
RLabs started with the idea that if you can change one person’s life by sharing a story of hope, and then inspire others, it can make a real difference. The organization itself sprang from experimentation and chance. When Marlon’s father-in-law, a local pastor, asked him to start giving computer lessons he realized that digital tools could be an effective way for people to tell their stories. This quickly spiraled into people developing their competences around social media, and even companies that advised others on how to use such platforms.
The core idea was to make the best out of whatever and whoever was at hand. In this way, people who were previously considered unemployable became valuable contributors—and turned their lives around. Making the best use of whatever diverse materials are at hand—bricolage—can apply not just to objects but to skills and people as well. Examples in the Cape Flats are former drug addicts and dealers who became useful and joyful members of the community by telling their stories of hope and recovery and teaching others.
The result was a paradigm shift in the community, from focusing on what was missing (money or formal skills) to what resources were available—and making the best out of every situation. A former drug addict can now picture herself as a teacher, having seen others with a similar background enter the profession and having a space in which to do it. She is no longer perceived as a liability but rather as a valued member of society. She is now someone who has the agency to create her own luck. Serendipity is within her grasp.
An RLabs partner summarized to me her realization that they can make things happen themselves, giving them inspiration and dignity. To them, it is the opposite of being in need, of being a victim.
Shifting toward this opportunity-focused mindset enables previously unseen possibilities. Taking whatever is at hand, looking at it afresh, and recombining it with other objects, skills, people, or ideas frequently leads to yet more previously unimagined ideas and insights and, as the example of RLabs demonstrates, a profound change in outlook.
Serendipity at RLabs now happens all the time, and the related approaches are now being used by companies and governments around the world. For example, a large South African bank that was planning to cut its workforce and sell office space now looks at former cashiers as potential financial trainers, and the office space as potential training centers. What were liabilities became assets.
In my research I have encountered many people such as Marlon. Some of them have faced severe structural constraints and challenges that seem impossible to overcome. (And sometimes they are, and we can never blame someone for their circumstances – as we will see in later chapters, working on changing structural constraints related to poverty, socio-economic class, race, and gender is paramount). However, many individuals and organizations, such as RLabs in South Africa, started creating their own luck by being alert to the possibilities around them. In this way, their entire situation was reframed from one of passivity and powerlessness to one of activity and opportunity.
Reframe or Perish
I may have made this sound too easy, but the mindset that is alert to serendipity is difficult to develop, particularly if we feel our thinking might be off-base, or if our environment is hostile to new ideas. Yet, despite the difficulties, there are clear steps we can take to foster this serendipity-enhancing approach and reshape our minds to be open and prepared.
In a multi-year-long research project, we found that RLabs developed a number of simple practices that successfully shaped mindsets, and enabled serendipity to blossom.1 By providing simple rules of thumb that empowered partners to make do in their respective contexts, RLabs was able to function with a small team while growing the reach of the organization.
For example, its budgeting approach for new projects is guided by questions such as, “Is this item essential?” If the answer is yes, then does someone here have access to the item without having to buy it? If no, do you know someone who might have access to it? If not, is there an alternative that is less expensive? Only after you answer these questions should an item be bought. This approach is driven by the idea that often we look for new resources even though we might have alternatives at hand that might work just as well.
In one case, the RLabs team used personal interactions via Skype and in person, storytelling, and the transfer of simple, inexpensive practices and tool kits, including a simple guide to social media, to shift mindsets and nurture his local activities.
RLabs might appear to be a rare example, but our research shows that similar patterns hold true, whether it’s a waiter in London or the painter in mid-century Europe or a Fortune 500 CEO in the United States. The lessons can be extended into almost any sphere, be it our own lives, apprenticeship schemes, business support programs, enterprise incubators, or, indeed, whole companies.
Once we stop obsessing about our lack of resources and look to enable individuals and give them dignity, we find that instead of beneficiaries looking for our help or employees worried about budgets, we have stimulated people who start creating their own luck.
Reframing helps to create serendipity by enabling people to see potential events and situations and feel they have the capacity to act on those—to spot the triggers and connect the dots. At the core of this are changes in thought and practice. Once we stop waiting for an opportunity to loudly declare itself, we realize that opportunity is all around us if we keep our mind open and release it from closed templates and frames.
When we do not take structures and constraints for granted, we look at the world with different eyes. We start to see bridges where others see gaps.