Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business

To Paradox Is Human

This will not be an easy change to make. The machine logic of the industrial age—predictable inputs leads to predictable outputs—is deeply incompatible with the human-scale, improvisational nature of planned serendipity. When we pursue them both at the same time, we inevitably end up in a double bind, where one command contradicts the other—in this case, “be predictable” versus “be creative.”

The double bind is a recipe for frustration, angst, and ultimately failure, but only if we fail to escape from it. We can free ourselves from any double bind by replacing its distorted logic with a new way of thinking, like the creators of the Agile software development process did. They resolved the dysfunctional tension between serendipity ...