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In a modern-day professional context, we do
this quite regularly, through a combination
of active and passive opportunities, such
as reading books, observing situations,
attending conferences and even just having
a quiet coffee with a colleague or two. This
is how our ideas collide (and keep colliding)
until our slow hunches turn into something
significant. All of which now brings me to my
own recent encounter with serendipity …
So, there I was, wisely minding my own
business, when three things happened in
quick succession. As with any occurrence of
serendipitous good fortune, I was simply an
innocent by-stander: Befuddled, bemused
and trying to make sense of it all.
The first of these three serendipitous
events was that I met Alyson. Alyson is a
career coach and quite a recent migrant to
Wellington, having made the move from the
United States, only a few months ago. The
two of us found ourselves on the founding
committee of the grandiosely named
Wellington Small Business Group, and we
inevitably struck up a conversation around
comparative coaching practice.
The second event happened shortly after
this, when I received an invitation from a
very jovial and pleasant Irishman by the
name of Cillin (that’s pronounced ‘kill lean’,
for those readers with an interest in other
languages). Cillin has been in Wellington
somewhat longer than Alyson has, and
he also works in the coaching space, as a
business consultant. Cillin is the moving
force behind a coaching network which
meets regularly to discuss matters related to
coaching, so again the inevitable happened
and we found ourselves in the same room,
sharing the same conversation.
About the author
Phil Sales heads up Business Development and
Entrepreneurship for the School of Business at
Whitireia New Zealand
[www.whitireia.ac.nz].
So far, so good. For those familiar with the
old saying ‘once is an accident, twice is
coincidence and three times is a habit’, I was
about to turn this coincidence into a habit,
which has been pre-occupying my thoughts
for the last few weeks.
The third event was an email that landed on
my desk from Jenni at Capital Hockey. Some
of you may know that hockey is an ‘inter-
generational thing’ in my family and that I
have been involved in coaching the sport
for many years now. Here now, was an email
from the new Capital Coaching Collective
asking for my thoughts on elite coaching
opportunities.
OK, so I know that this is just a simple
clustering effect, where things just happen
to fall together without any deeper intrinsic
meaning. It just so happens that three
instances of something-of-interest-to-me
have occurred in a short space of time and
my tiny little human brain is now trying to
read some significance into them.
At the same time, these three happenings
aren’t entirely without meaning. As I sit and
reflect, I can relate this random sequence of
events to Steven Johnson’s thoughts around
where great ideas come from, and somehow
it all seems to make perfect sense to me.
I can see the ideas of others (such as
Alyson, Cillin and Jenni) gently bumping
into each other in different combinations.
With a bit of luck, over time and with a bit
of experimentation, some of these shared
thoughts will start to gain momentum, and
maybe eventually collide, with enough force
to turn a few ‘slow hunches’ into some really
great ideas.
For all of us, the message is pretty clear.
We can all benefit when we do three simple
things: Connecting, sharing and reflecting.
How well we do this depends on how open
we are to making these three principles
work for us. At work, a good place to start
is by sharing your own ‘small hunches’ with
your team, and then listening to their own
insights, in return.
So, at the end of the day, what is the big
takeaway that we can learn from all this?
What is the ultimate ‘big idea’ that all these
slow hunches and fortuitous interactions
lead up to? For me, it is the thought that
we can build more-and-richer ideas by
increasing the number of quality interactions
that we have with the people around us.
As Steven Johnson says, “That's the real
lesson of where good ideas come from. That
chance favours the connected mind.”
December 2017
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