Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with Mel Woods of SerenA, the multi-disciplinary project that aims to 'deliver novel technologies, methods and evaluation techniques for supporting serendipitous interactions'. SerenA's scope is primarily how serendipity can be engineered in the service of research. Mel and her colleagues worked on the hypothesis that serendipity can be optimised and have developed a model to do so. Whilst engineered serendipity appears to be an oxymoron, the model seems effective and SerenA have held several workshops to develop this idea further.
We had a wide-ranging discussion about the role that serendipity plays in the making of connections and innovation in large organisations, for example locating expertise and problem-solving. In November we hope to take this forward with a full-day event with SerenA where KIN members can get involved in serendipity in digital and physical spaces.
SerenA has collected many stories about serendipitous encounters and presented these as beautiful graphical and audio stories. The example below is one of several available on the brilliantly named SerendipiTV
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I know that you wondered whether serendipity has any role in the knowledge-related activities of a law firm and lawyers. I think it does, even though your right that there's a lot of focus on codification of knowledge, for example, as legal precedents. Three different examples come to mind:
Firstly, in the courtroom the lawyer's job is to look for preceding case decisions that can help win the current argument. The winning point needn't come from a previous decision that was directly related to the issue currently under consideration. It could have arisen from a completely different set of circumstances, for example, the interpretation of the word "reasonable" in a case that involved a building company's negligence might be usefully applied to a case of personal injury; the gifted lawyer will look for similarities across what at first seem to be unrelated cases.
Secondly, law firms are just as fraught with silos as any other organisation, especially as they grow in size. Lawyers work in different jurisdictions, in different offices and different practice groups. There's a growing realisation that they need to be brought together into cross-silo communities of interest to help apply their technical knowledge to solve clients' problems. So increasingly we see lawyers being invited to share their problems and ideas in communities focused on a particular industry sector; they bring different perspectives to come up with often quite innovative solutions. And even with practice areas it's quite common for a group of lawyers to meet frequently to share stories about what's keeping their clients awake at night; from these meetings, they happen upon other experts' approaches to the problem that won't have been written down anywhere else as a precedent or practice note.
Thirdly, law firm knowledge isn't all about technical legal knowhow. It's also knowledge about clients and about how the firm operates as a business. So there's a great need for different support functions to share knowledge, for example, IT and HR, business development and knowledge.
The idea that connecting the right experts is one of the most powerful ways of creating new knowledge to solve problems is just as relevant to law firms. I think they are traditionally known for the written form of knowledge because of the importance of cases, written advice and legislation. But tacit forms of knowledge sharing are just as important and we're always trying to remind lawyers of that fact!
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