Serendipity Recognition

topic

Serendipity recognition is the creative perceptual capacity to notice the relevance of unexpected observations, chance encounters, and accidental discoveries to problems one is actively working on — the ability to perceive, in apparently random and unrelated events, the connection to one's creative work that makes what appears to be a happy accident into a productive creative discovery. Louis Pasteur's observation that 'chance favors the prepared mind' identifies the perceptual prerequisite for serendipitous discovery.

Role

Serendipity recognition is the perceptual capacity that most directly separates the creative practitioner who exploits chance from the one who merely experiences it — because serendipitous discoveries are characteristically available to many observers simultaneously but noticed as relevant only by those whose prepared minds are tuned to perceive the connection between what is randomly encountered and what is creatively needed. Alexander Fleming was not the first person to observe that bacterial cultures could be contaminated by mold — but he was the one whose prepared medical mind perceived the connection between mold contamination and bacterial inhibition that produced the discovery of penicillin, while the same observation by unprepared minds was simply an experimental nuisance to be cleaned up.

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