Accidental Conversations / Chapter 1
Accidental Conversations / Freedom To Connect
Life happens in conversations. We weave the tapestry of our lives from looms of conversations.
These days, some of my best conversations run along threads of emails. Yesterday morning, an Internet chum in London asked me for a resource I didn't have on hand. This afternoon out of the blue, a colleague in Austin, Texas sends me an article that perfectly suits my London chum's need.
Of course none of this was planned. The best things in life seldom are. We rely on freedom in our connectivity to reveal life's endless evolution of serendipitous possibilities. Unpredictable times call for unpredictable conversations.
When I talk with people about how their life evolves and unfolds, I hear story after story revealing that their most personally significant conversations are unplanned. They tend to be more spontaneous and improvisational than scheduled and rehearsed. Without an agenda or goal, they move with the grace of water, flowing toward unexpected possibilities in common spaces created by curiosity. They emerge in hallways and around coffee tables, across backyard fences, at conferences, in chat rooms, and on discussion boards.
I did a story recently on Suzanne Rickard, President of Herman Machine. At the helm of this 1918 vintage parts supplier, Suzanne personifies the ageless entrepreneurial penchant for growing more by agility than agenda. She met her recent merger partner at a business seminar. She couldn't have scheduled this conversation any more than she could have forecasted the mutually profitable collaboration launching this new venture. She is one of many agile leaders who expect that growth is more often about focusing forward to the hyperlinks in our next conversation than looking backward to the details of yesterday's agenda. Hers was the lesson of accidental conversations -- that the more connected we are, the more potential for new possibilities we create.
We fall in love, begin our best adventures, and discover our most significant resources in informal, quite unplanned conversations. They are expressions of life's infinite capacity for surprise. The lesson of accidental conversations is that with all the plotting and planning we do, life continues to be delightfully unpredictable.
We can plan where we'll be today, but we may not be able to predict whom we'll bump into and in what new ways they will link us to life's endless evolution of resources and opportunities. We may decide to visit a new website, attend a seminar, or read a new book, but we cannot anticipate what we will learn there or to what new opportunities this learning may lead. We can schedule meetings, but we cannot forecast the conversational hyperlinks that will surface and connect us to new sources of inspiration or solution. We can set all kinds of goals, but we don't know what new technologies, opportunities, and markets will emerge next that will transform how we arrive at new vistas.
In accidental conversations, we discover again and again that life has no ability to stand still, no matter how earnestly we try to create consistency and predictability in a dynamic world. However much we try to surprise-proof the world with our goals, beliefs, and plans, life sustains change as its prime constant.
It is ironic that so many communities of work have become formal institutions dedicated to preventing surprise. Scheduled meetings, tight agendas, formal lines of authority, and centralized planning are the tools of this agenda aimed at creating a world predictable enough to be measured, planned, and controlled.
What's interesting is that no matter how much habitual momentum the formal organization has developed over time, the informal organization of unplanned conversations continues to thrive. The informal side of the organization is the dynamic field of actions and interactions that are too resilient, tacit, opportunistic, inventive, and fluid to be prescribed much less controlled.
The informal organization is the organic, self-organizing, and evolutionary network of adhocratic relationships and collaborations that pulsate in the white spaces and margins of organizational charts. We observe the informal organization at work in unplanned conversations between meetings, across emails, and in side conversations.
The informal organization is the work community's rainforest where new species of ideas, stories, and questions emerge and thrive. The idea that we can legislate any genre of spontaneity is unsupportable in my experience. This includes the quality of relationships that impact everything that occurs.
From his years of studying and writing about growing organizations, author Gifford Pinchot comes to the sage conclusion that The informal organization is the brains of the corporation and does nearly all the real work. The formal organization simply ratifies the decisions the informal organization has already made.
There is an intuitive appeal to the fertility of conversational freedom that allows people who drop by to join in with unplanned diversions and unrehearsed questions. We are intrigued with fresh contributions that are not locked into the inflexibility of a premeditated agenda.
We are beginning to question the expectation that a conversation that shows self-control will automatically yield a greater harvest of new possibilities than a conversation that thrives on freedom. J.M. Ryan Associates'President, Janet Ryan, is one of a new breed of people who can thrive on the power of the informal. As she suggests from her experience, The best business ideas come from unplanned conversations. Our growing appreciation for the informal is profoundly changing the way we think about how things get done in our communities of work.
In a two-year, $1.6 million study by the Center For Workforce Development in Newton, Massachusetts, one conclusion was that in spite of $50 billion spent annually on formal training, up to 70% of workforce learning is informal. With participation by industry heavyweights like Boeing and Motorola, the study reveals that the real learning is more likely in meetings, customer visits, spontaneous on-the-job interactions, shift reports, chats with bosses and mentors, and serendipitous links through web technologies.
A chance meeting in the hall. A quick visit to a co-worker. To a boss it may look like goofing off, but workers know better. The study concludes that, They often learn more chatting on the job than in any training session. When I get involved in events that organizations call training (treats not included), I prefer a process that is intentionally designed to facilitate the kind of natural, accidental conversations that apparently drive the vast majority of our knowledge and skill development.
Steve Kerr, General Electric's corporate training director, indicates from GE's extensive internal data that a meager 10% of employees cite formal training as the source of the best learning in their careers. According to Steve, The majority of peak learning experiences occur on the job¡ªthrough serendipity, not planning.
Synchronicity author, Joe Jaworski, reflects this in his amazing life. When we are in this state of being where we are open to life and all its possibilities, willing to take the next step as it is presented to us, then we meet the most remarkable people who are important contributors to our life. In a universe abundant with unpredictable evolution, planning is redefined as receptivity and preparation.
We have come to depend on informal conversations as a prime source of connectivity at all levels in our work and our life. We expect to do our best learning, dealing, and bonding in conversations we never schedule or plan. How many times a day do you get into a conversation with someone only to come away with something you didn't have going in? Maybe it's a news flash, a bit of gossip, a fresh insight, idea, or question. You may have gotten a hint of some new opportunity or link to an undiscovered resource.
Accidental conversations are those unplanned interactions that punctuate our lives like hypertext on web pages. They emerge at the edges of our scheduled landscapes. They begin as simple comments or questions and can evolve as complex adaptive events into some of our best relationships, opportunities, and connections. Their ability to evolve requires only our willingness to keep the feel of the interaction relaxed.
For those of us who expect accidental conversations to perform everyday magic, the examples are abundant. A few months ago, in the midst of steaming coffee and a crisp copy of the NY Times, a friend appears on the seat next to me at a local diner. He's waiting for some other people and references a project they're working on. The day before, a hallway conversation in another city produced for me the names of people who would now become the very unplanned solution to a problem in my friend's project. Connections are made and rabbits are once again pulled from serendipitous hats.
If the world evolves in ways we cannot forecast, connective freedom becomes the key to our discovering the emergence of the next new thing. From this perspective, we need to be unhesitant in our response to invitations to study the ever-changing contours of life with the agile fingers of our curiosity.
I attend a fair number of talks by noteworthy authors, writers, artists, and entrepreneurs. One of my favorite questions is about the serendipity behind their greatest legacies. Serendipity is a frequent character in each drama.
Our stories are filled with examples like this, some less dramatic on the world's stage, but in our personal scripts, they are manifestations of sheer magic and grace. As Verifone co-founder, William Pape told Inc. magazine recently, Most really useful information comes from informal conversations.
The Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center is a 500-acre campus set in a wonderful urban National Park in northern Ohio. A chance meeting between one of the Center¡¯s teachers and philanthropist Morton November yielded a permanent memorial for the Center in the form of a three-quarter million dollar lodge for educational programs to area students, teachers, and scouts. Morton remembers, Susan told me to get into her car one day and she drove me out there. I knew right away this was it.
Although personal initiative, local experimentation, and collaborative improvisation get things done in the informal organization, it is hardly random chaos and anarchy. The freedom people have in their connectivity creates an evolving coherence that outperforms any fragmented hierarchy. Nor does all this self-organization and spontaneity mean that interactions have only fleeting or local significance. What happens unplanned can have long-term effects that ripple in unpredictable and non-local ways. In the informal organization, a single unexpected discovery or encounter can lead to all sorts of significant implications.
In many communities of work today, the informal organization is thriving thanks to the decentralization of information and governance that empowers people with more entrepreneurial opportunities than ever.
Add to this trend, a growing disinterest in micromanaging by managers and the (micro)managed alike, combined with the fact that there is a new breed of people who have grown weary of knowledge and resource monopolies in hierarchies.
Since his achievement as the 6th man of the moon, astronaut Edgar Mitchell has been busy founding and supporting the Institute For Noetic Sciences, a leading institute dedicated to exploring the quite vast landscape of possibilities of human potential. The story of the Institute's initial funding is a story that begins with an unplanned chat with a stranger in a laundromat. The next day, a check for $25,000 was delivered, leading to the successful launch of an Institute that today serves over 50,000 members.
The magic of unplanned discovery occurs even among the most noted and knowledgeable among us. Nobel prize winners are among the most disciplined and rigorous people churning out the next generation of industry-leading technologies. And yet to what degree would we guess their most celebrated outcomes are the result of detailed plots and linear plans. If you talked to Herb Simon, a psychology and computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, you got yet another of life's many paradoxes. According to Herb, If you look at the Nobel laureates, in case after case, the critical event was a surprise.
Jerry Hirshberg, founder of the award-winning Nissan Design International, concludes at this point in his innovative career, Many of the best ideas are communicated through whispers¡ªin the hallway meetings that happen after the official meeting.
I always have to catch my breath when I scan the list of inventions and discoveries that emerged accidentally. Scott Tissue, Kellogg's corn flakes, French fries, Velcro, penicillin, x-rays, Teflon, dynamite, electric batteries, pulsars, insulin, pap tests, safety glass, nylon, aspirin, Post-Its, Scotchguard, DNA, Styrofoam, the use of superconducting magnets for particle acceleration in MRI technologies, carbonated water, vulcanized rubber, matches, potato chips, telescopes, and chocolate chip cookies. Of course there is an equally long list of very planned, engineered breakthroughs. I only offer the list to show that amazing things can come about simply when we allow ourselves the freedom to interact with and look at our world in new ways.
In The Fortune Sellers, author William Sherden talks about his rigorous exploration into the chaordic nature of our universe and the variety of attempts at predicting its behavior. Reflecting on his writing process, he says that, My research for this book was greatly helped by a few random acts by friends and relatives, who gave me books ¡ which I doubt I would have discovered through my normal methodical research approach. The celebrated legacy of Joseph Campbell echoes this observation: Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
There is a new breed of us who thrive on accidental conversations. In fact, we would quite unapologetically admit to expecting our businesses to succeed and lives to work according to the paradox of strategic serendipity. Does this mean we have abandoned all sense of planning and control? We'll visit that question later.
In the meantime, we clearly expect to find more surprises in informal than formal conversations. We have begun to resist the temptation to restrict who we will talk to, what we will talk about, who we will invite to join us, what media the conversation can continue in, and where the conversational threads will lead. Casual mentions, innocent questions, and off-line references today reemerge to inform, inspire, and entertain us days, months, or years later. Because something is not relevant or pertinent to this conversation now in no way means it has no potential in future situations. We cannot predict the long term potential for any immediate conversational content¡ªno matter how provocative or impertinent.
To the extent that we are slaves to our goals, there is a certain feel of inefficiency in allowing our time to be taken up with chance conversations that by nature have no vision or plan. We need to keep reminding ourselve' that this kind of randomness and redundancy is at the heart of nature¡s efficiency when it comes to creating new possibilities.
Even though accidental conversations are unplanned, they are not uncaused. I recently looked up accidental and was interested to discover that it refers to events where causes are transparent, not non-existent. We daily create the conditions for accidental conversations. Spending time in common spaces is one condition for their emergence. What are the common spaces in your world? Where are people most likely to bump into and discover one another in unplanned and unscheduled ways?
Meg Wheatley, who has worked with some of the more radically reorganizing organizations around, extracts from her observations simple truths: Most strategic initiatives start in informal conversations. Or as Zentrepreneur Jane Plank reminds me, Two serendipitous heads are better than one.
I am continuously amazed by the magic that occurs when someone drops uninvited into a conversational space, and when included, brings a dimension beyond the scope of original members. They know something we don't. They raise a question we haven't. They suggest something beyond what has already been considered. Maybe they introduce a totally unrelated quip, story, hearsay, or musing that shifts the kaleidoscope of tones in a way that energizes us in a more productive direction.
For futurists Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker, the power of serendipity is a given in an intrinsically unpredictable universe. Their advice is to Recognize that most of the things that have truly changed your life have been the fruition not of elaborate planning but of coincidental accidents. Real life happens in these kinds of informal interactions. In describing the secrets to her success in developing the historic global landmine ban that led to her Nobel Prize, Jodie Williams cites: email.
As author Derm Barrett suggests, The truth is that some of the most important things in life are simply lucked into. The role that chance plays in our personal, professional and business destinies is nothing less than enormous.
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Quotes From Accidental Conversations
- Drawn to the oasis of serendipity at watercoolers, we have become each other¡¯s best search engines.
- The lesson of accidental conversations is that with all the plotting and planning we do, life continues to be delightfully unpredictable.
- Accidental conversations are those unplanned interactions that punctuate our lives like hypertext on web pages.
- There is little virtue in being inflexible in a nonlinear world.
- In a world that never stops dancing, holding on to any single position puts us out of step with life.
- Many of us have come to expect that we live in an unpredictable world -- certainly not because we are such sloppy planners and lazy goal setters, but because unpredictability is the quantum nature of the world we share.
- Luck becomes a viable strategy for our success when we discover that we can create the conditions for it.
- On both sides of what and who, the more we know, the luckier we seem to be.
- The power of accidental conversations is their ability to connect us to an infinite field of learning and discovery.
- Life happens in conversations; in the beginning is the word.
- Attachment to certainty disables learning and learning disability profoundly cripples our capacity for dialogue, collaboration, and evolution.
- Accidental conversations are the yeast in our curiosity¡¯s daily bread.
- Life expands to the size of our inquiry.
- Our choice in this world is collaboration or extinction.
- Organizations are only as interesting as their relationships.
- The freedom to cultivate a diversity of relationships is basic to all other dimensions of freedom.
- The quintessential event in the informal organization is the telling of a story.
- If we can cover the ears of our egos, we can easily admit that we discover, more than we design, many of the best things in life.
- Uncertainty is the space in our mind where seeing begins.
- The gift of the stranger is the revelation that what we have in common is immense.
- Redefining our sense of focus as expansive rather than constrictive allows us to cultivate a variety of interests and abilities that can ultimately make us more agile in a dynamic world.
- Life is an expansive lattice unless we cut it down to the narrow trek of a ladder.
- I am rarely disappointed by my expectation that there is a whole world evolving that hides until I go seek.
- Connectivity unleashes our capacities for intelligent compassion, creativity, and collaboration.
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