You may know that feeling: you’ve attended an event, chatted with lots of interesting people, you’ve gone home and the next day you continue with your day-to-day work, more often than not forgetting those conversations and your new contacts quickly again. But sometimes, just sometimes things happen afterwards, you follow up, or your contact follows up.

And this is what happened here and led to this book review. I have crossed paths with Dr Christian Busch many moons ago. He is a management and innovation scholar, previously at the London School of Economics (hence we crossed paths in London), now an Associate Professor at the USC Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles. More than a year ago, he contacted me on LinkedIn to let me know that his latest book, ‘Connect the Dots. The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck’ had been published by Penguin and whether I’d be interested in reviewing it. I was and it is only down to my ongoing struggle with Long Covid (another story, to be told another time) that it has taken me so long to be finally writing this.

In his book Christian delves deep into the world of serendipity, defined as “the unexpected good luck resulting from unplanned moments in which proactive decisions lead to positive outcomes” (p. 3).

I have to say, I was sceptical at first. I had come across the idea of ‘engineering serendipity’ a lot in my career, which may be no surprise given that I am interested in spatial layouts and unplanned encounters (among other things) – see for example my 2021 paper with my collaborator Matt Thomas on the relationship between workplace layouts and organisational outcomes in open-plan versus cellular offices.

Engineering serendipity always struck me as non-sensical – either an event or encounter is planned or unplanned. So how could you plan for the unplanned without turning it into something planned at the same time? Or how could you arrange to meet up with someone to spark inspiration or new ideas, if you don’t know who you need to meet in the first place?

Interestingly, Christian doesn’t speak about ‘engineering’ serendipity; he rather argues that serendipity happens to all of us all of the time – we meet new people, we chat, we learn new things – but what makes a difference is firstly, how likely it is that those new encounters happen (called the creation of a ‘serendipity field’), and secondly, what you then make of those opportunities (called the development of a ‘serendipity mindset’). With those two conditions in place, we can actively ‘connect the dots’ and create opportunities towards making things happen, according to the author.

The book acted like a treasure trove to me – I discovered many things I did not yet know, for example the origin of the word serendipity (a Persian fairy tale), or the distinction between different types of serendipity (Archimedes serendipity, post-it note serendipity and thunderbolt serendipity), or the fact that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was never intended as a hierarchy. At the same time, it was a frustrating read for me here and there hunting down those treasures, which seemed hidden among dozens if not hundreds of stories of people making unusual connections.

The book acted like a treasure trove to me – I discovered many things I did not yet know.

And naturally, as a scholar researching architecture and spatial layouts in relation to human behaviour, I was also hunting for nuggets of what the book had to say about the role of the physical environment.

References to physical space are indeed dotted around the book, for example:

• in an argument in chapter 1 that establishing a serendipity field requires “restructuring our organizations, networks and physical sources” (p.27);
• that connecting with purpose also occurs through the values that “manifest in the very buildings we operate in” (p.117-118);
• that the physical environment can be a serendipity trigger, for example in the shape of communal tables in co-working spaces (chapter 5, p. 151-153);
• and that different modes of working, e.g. managing versus making require different temporal and spatial settings (chapter 6, p. 206-209).

Finally, spatial structures are discussed in a bit more detail in chapter 8 (Fostering the Conditions for Serendipity), which includes a subsection on ‘Shaping physical and virtual spaces for serendipity’ (p.254-256).

It lists ample case study examples (Pixar, Google, the Royal Society of Arts, Impact Hubs, Yahoo and more) and highlights interesting ideas on how the physical environment might shape serendipity but the author neither gives guidelines on how to design better buildings, nor concrete evidence of potential mechanisms for this relationship and its underlying science. Instead, the section leans heavily on a single New York Times article from 2013 (with the dreaded title ‘Engineering Serendipity’).

To go a bit deeper into why this might be problematic, several of these case study examples are self-referential, Pixar being one of the most cited of them. In Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs is quoted as having deliberately designed the Pixar building to promote collaboration and unplanned encounters. If you do a google search on ‘Pixar building serendipity’ you find 1.2 million search results, mostly newspaper and business magazine articles (as well as a few scholarly pieces), all citing each other, or Isaacson’s book. To my knowledge, no single study exists that would have verified that assumption with empirical data by studying the behavioural patterns of Pixar employees, understanding the difference the building makes, or in fact which part or configuration of the building supports encounter and collaboration (if someone finds one, please let me know!).

Connect the Dots sometimes sounds as if the cited case studies are examples for other organisations to aspire to, but then it clearly also warns against a copy-and-paste attitude, which is all to often found in the workplace consultancy industry (at some point everyone wanted a Google slide and beanbags…). Instead, Busch warns that “copying only one element of an ecosystem usually fails – we need complementary elements such as culture and commitment.” (p. 264)

So, what did I take away from the read? Well, the dots that got connected in my brain when reading the book centred around networks, both spatial and social networks.

The argument that a serendipity field would make it more likely for connections to occur is closely related to similar ideas brought forward by the scholarly community of Space Syntax, a theory and method first popularised by Julienne Hanson and Bill Hillier (for example in their 1984 foundational book ‘The Social Logic of Space’) and featuring regularly in my blog posts.

In an almost equally old paper, ‘Creating Life, or: Does Architecture Determine Anything?’, published in 1987, Hillier and his colleagues argue that spatial structure creates a “potential field of probabilistic co-presence and encounter” (p. 248). Structure in this case takes the shape of a network of spaces (like rooms in a building, or streets in a city) that are interconnected with one another (by doors and staircases in a building, or street intersections in a city). This spatial structure can be dense or sparse, it can be organised in local clusters or a global overarching structure (such as a tree), it can be intelligible or unintelligible, it can bring different groups of people together or keep them apart.

In any case, the particular structure of a spatial network, unique to each building or city, is meaningful in that it distributes movement flows and makes encounters more or less likely. In a recent book chapter of mine entitled ‘Spatial Opportunity Structures for Resilient Social Networks – The Role of Architectural and Urban Form’ (published in 2022 in the book ‘A Research Agenda for Social Networks and Social Resilience) I have argued together with my co-author Xiaoming Li that architectural and urban form provide opportunity structures towards desirable outcomes. Particularly regarding unplanned encounters and innovative capacity, the already mentioned paper with Matt Thomas contends that the physical design of a workplace in addition to the way the organisational chart is manifested in a seating plan brings a probability game towards meeting others to life, which is the foundation for the generation of new ideas.

In my view, spatial structure is a powerful lever for the creation of a serendipity field, obviously alongside other factors such as organisational culture.

The second connection that got sparked by reading the book is related to the field of social networks. Social Network Analysis is a theory and method with a long tradition in sociology, reaching back to roots laid by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, as well as Jacob Moreno’s work on sociometry in the 1930s, then gaining traction in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Harrison White and his students. The main premise of social network analysis is to understand the structure of relationships among people and which resources flow through the subsequent social network of nodes (people) and ties (relations between them). It has blossomed into a strongly interdisciplinary field with dozens of applications, disciplinary niches and methodological advances.

While Connect the Dots never really enters the realm of social network analysis (neither does it cite space syntax by the way), there are certainly relevant and important connections to be made.

The first that came to my mind is Thomas Valente’s work on social networks and public health, and in particular his work on network interventions, i.e., “purposeful efforts to use social networks or social network data to generate social influence, accelerate behavior change, improve performance, and/or achieve desirable outcomes among individuals, communities, organizations, or populations.” (Valente, 2012, p. 49)

Christian Busch’s serendipity mindset and the idea to connect dots and act on them is reminiscent of activating networks to achieve certain outcomes, or in the words of Tom Valente, a network intervention of the kind that alters a network, for example by adding links (meeting new people, introducing someone to another person in your network – all of which are examples used repeatedly by Busch).

To me, those are possibly the biggest take-aways from the book (which certainly got me thinking in many different directions), i.e., the opportunities to connect the ideas of a serendipity field to spatial network theory, and the opportunities to connect the idea of a serendipity mindset to social network theory.

I can imagine lots of fascinating research avenues to continue building those bridges between disciplines and deepening the reflections on the circumstances and environmental conditions that help bring things into the world.

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Review of: Busch, Christian (2022): Connect the Dots. The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, Penguin. First published as: The Serendipity Mindset, 2020.