#ThinkfullyHabit: Take a chance
How often have things in your life been influenced by a chance encounter or a happy accident? Chances are there's been a few.
Happy accidents have had a huge influence on our lives. Take Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin by chance after he went on holiday in 1928 without washing away his bacteria samples and on return found bacteria fighting fungus growing in his absence. Or Frederick G. Banting and Professor John J.R. MacLeod whose Nobel Prize for their use of insulin against diabetes followed on from the chance discovery by two German physicians who removed the pancreas of a healthy dog while studying the role of the pancreas in digestion. Afterwards, they happened to notice a swarm of flies around the dog’s urine – attracted by sugar. It was this accidental observation that the dog was secreting sugar that led to the realisation of the link between the pancreas and blood-sugar levels.
In fact, if we ever needed convincing of the importance of chance, analysis reveals that 35% of all the anticancer drugs now in clinical use can be directly traced to serendipitous events.*
“There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”
WHY?
The paradox is that it’s not necessarily about leaving chance to chance and waiting for it to happen. As the old Gipsy proverb says, “the dog that trots about finds the bone.” It's not about whether we encounter coincidences or serendipitous moments, but whether we are open to new possibilities coming our way and then whether we have the curiosity to follow the observation and the judgement to see what's worth exploring.
Architects have been some of the first to acknowledge the importance of chance encounters within building design, creating walking routes that encourage people to 'bump into’ others in different parts of the organisation. Delta Airways is another example of an organisation looking to give a helping hand to bring about more chance encounters through their mentoring program that takes place at 35,000 feet. They opened their ‘Innovation class’ for business with the idea that they could help connect people on their flights; using time in the air not just to fly but to share knowledge with the people seated next to them.
Our real challenge now is how to keep our chance encounters high when more and more of our lives and communication is online and planned. To give ourselves the 'chance advantage' requires us to put ourselves in less structured situations and seize opportunities to join conversations on the periphery of our core focus. Steve Jobs famously happened to drop into a typography class at University and many years later this chance moment led to Apple being the first to care about beautiful typefaces. It raises the question of what online conferences you can gatecrash or stumble into that may create the dots that you could then follow? In fact, next time you have 10 minutes, TedTalks has a ‘surprise me’ option that may throw up something interesting (or not) - that bit is down to chance.**
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