...and the value of space for serendipity
Transcript of this video:
I want you to imagine you are in a parallel universe,
similar in many ways to our own,
and you are in your favourite coffee shop, sipping,
in my case, a nice espresso with a friend
and having a nice casual conversation.
Only in this universe when someone enters the coffee shop,
they make a loud announcement, like,
“Let me explain the five key steps
to success in corporate social responsibility.”
And then they list them holding up a little image card
of an emoticon, a different emoticon
for each of their five points.
And when they finish their little speech,
everyone in the shop shouts that they love that
or they like it or they found it interesting or funny,
or they offer a comment and for three
or four minutes there’s a flurry of announcements
to and fro across the room.
And then things settle down again,
and you are able finally to return
to your nice casual conversation with your friend.
Only each time someone comes in the shop,
they make an announcement.
“Here are the seven things I learned on my recovery from
workaholism,” listing the seven points
with the same shouting across the room from everybody.
And you don’t get to have your natural conversation.
And I feel that is what modern life is tending to do
to a lot of our conversations and ways of relating.
I was thinking of this story when going on,
away days and development days
because I host quite a few of them
and I attend quite a lot of other people’s.
And what I’ve noticed on these events is
at the beginning when people meet for the first time, many
of them attempt to introduce themselves with
what feels like a relatively familiar,
and – to my ears – slightly long, speech about-
who they are and what they do.
“Uh, my company is in the such and such business and we find…”
and they don’t realise they’re giving a set speech
and it’s actually not terribly interesting.
But if the day’s any good and it’s sufficiently provocative
and experiential or if it’s not good,
but goes wrong in interesting ways, gradually
as the day rolls on,
people start having much more spontaneous conversations
about things they’ve noticed and they start telling,
telling each other stories,
but they’re much less, they’re much less scripted stories,
they’re more spontaneous.
And somewhere in the middle of those small conversations,
I find that people tend
to get much more interesting insights,
often serendipitously into the subject
of the day without anybody busily teaching
or explaining it to them.
Now in my first career,
advertising, and in my second career -broadly training
and development, I think we’ve defaulted to a processes
where we pitch things, either ideas in advertising
or teach processes in training as if it’s very important
that we tick all these boxes to get there.
And increasingly, my hunch is
that this actually kills off the kind
of relaxed serendipity, which is more likely to lead
to interesting insights.
And what I’ll be doing with Practice Groups is trying
to lean much more towards that kind of space
where we share interesting experiences
and then there’s much less pressure to learn
or teach specific things
and much more opportunity to make interesting connections
with one another.
Photo by Petr Sevcovic on Unsplash
