Coworking breaks down the emotional barriers (and sometimes the physical ones too) that the traditional business world put up to keep us each in our place. Isolated. After working in this vacuum for a few years, its no wonder some of the best and brightest are striking out on their own, trading a little financial security for a lot of professional freedom. Coworking provides solopreneurs with exactly what they’re looking for: a place where collaboration and community are highly valued, where social capital is more important than currency, and where titles and profit margins take a back seat to the unique talents that each of us bring to the table.
According to author Sebastian Olma, this paradox of wonderfulness is an emerging business trend, and it has a name: Serendipity. In his new book, The Serendipity Machine: A Disruptive Business Model for Society 3.0, Olma defines serendipity as “value creation based on unexpected encounters.” Companies like Google and LinkedIn are starting to realize that in order to access outside the box thinking, they need to let their thinkers roam outside the office. Olma claims that (with the help his book, of course) companies can alter their culture to become “serendipity machines”, places where these valuable encounters have no choice but to take place.
In essence, he’s teaching companies how to become more like coworking spaces.
When you join a coworking space, you plug in to an instant community. No business cards, no elevator pitches. You simply take your seat, and the interactions begin. The person at the next desk asks your name and what you do. Some members invite you out to lunch and you exchange tales about crappy clients. The community manager posts a social media message about someone looking for design help, exactly the kind you love, by the way, and in two days, you’ve landed a new gig.
These aren’t imaginary scenarios of serendipity, they happen every day in coworking communities. They are “accidents” that almost always lead to abundance, emotionally, professionally, and often, financially.
According to Olma, however, fixed coworking spaces are flawed. The example used throughout the book is Seats2Meet.com, a Dutch company that helps people find temporary work, meeting, or event spaces usually located inside the walls of an established company. This model, with its constantly shifting players, is what the author considers to be the “ideal” serendipity machine. In fact, he thinks the level of serendipity a coworking space can achieve is limited by the number of members.
“The membership model creates a natural barrier, turning a potentially open network into an internal and therefore somewhat closed community,” sais Olma. “Through the membership model, coworking spaces even run the risk of creating relatively exclusive community islands that, instead of exploiting their shared serendipity, weaken each other through unnecessary network competition.”
This would seem to suggest that unless you’re part of a massive coworking community like Indy Hall or CoCo, there’s probably not going to be enough serendipity to go around. We call bullshit on this statement. Olma’s feeling about coworking spaces assumes that members operate in a “No Girls Allowed” clubhouse mentality. He assumes that as members of a coworking space, we only associate with other coworkers, and as such, are only willing to refer work to someone who is also a member.
Raise your hand if the only people you know are also members of your coworking space. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Perhaps unbeknownst to Olma, coworkers are a diverse lot. We have lots of friends, neighbors and connections, many of whom may work for traditional firms or companies. We may have contacts in other cities, states, or countries. We may even (gasp) have had traditional jobs in the past, and maintain relationships with our former coworkers. Our collaborative mindset compels us to seek out the right person for the job, and that means also drawing on our vast network of non-coworking acquaintances.
Coworking doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We don’t isolate ourselves from the rest of the community. Rather, we are merely one organism in this ecosystem, constantly working for the good of us all. That’s why coworking is the fast track to serendipity. So if you don’t have a big company, or want want to give this trend a try before starting your transformation into a “Serendipity Machine”, let your employees cowork for a day or two a week. We’ve got all the serendipity you need.
Want to hear more about how to accelerate serendipity in your life and work? Cohere founder Angel K. will be speaking on the topic at the upcoming Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) in Austin, TX. Check out her panel “Serendipity on Steriods” to learn more about how it can be fostered and measured.
Image via pfjk/Flickr
A hefty comment. Great reaction to the fact that serendipity has nothing to do with a machine…or does it?
I think that what Sebastian is doing with his book is to show that:
-traditional companies have to become more open in order to survive and actively connect with Knowmads/coworkers, thus not to wait for knowmads to contact them-that numerous coworking spaces worldwide, not limited to the US, are struggling with their business model model, especially the smaller ones, so therefore (rightly in my opinion) he questions the ‘membership model’ of being sustainable-network of peers can be strong in the beginning, but show a tendency to become a closed circle, thus loose their momentum due to the lack of new input form the outside world (Vandenhoff, 2011)
What you describe about your location is exactly our experience as well: coworkers are extremely well connected people. We at Seats2meet.com are trying to speed up the connection with the traditional world by stimulating serendipity, as for us that’s the only way out of this global crisis: creating a new economic moral, system and values.
Please note that we are a coworking centre, not an in-plant solution for companies as you are suggesting.
We offer free-coworking (including free desks, free wifi, free coffee/tea and on some locations even a free lunch-no membership fees!), where coworkers pay by means of social capital (sharing their knowledge and talents, visualized by using dashboards like http://s2m.to/utrechtcs ) and money is made of additional rental of meeting rooms and/or other services.
We want to share our knowledge, that why we sponsored this book and why we offer our software for free for anybody who wants to join in via http://www.myowns2m.com . So we encourage companies to offer (small scale!) free coworking (as they have an abundance of desks) and that way we are creating a hub and spoke model, where small cowork locations in corporations are connected to larger coworking-and meeting centers, thus creating a large (virtual knowledge & talents) network hovering above an larger geographical area.
We show in the Netherlands that this model of free-coworking is scalable and sustainable this way: we have grown in 3 years from 1 to over 75 locations, have opened up in Cairo and will open next week in Tokyo/Japan. Some locations have 4 seats only, other offer hundreds. In The Netherlands in 2012 our systems handled over 400K meeting-& coworking seats.
So, coworking for us is sharing, connecting and creating new values in a society we like to call Society30, an environment where everybody, traditional and modern, is more than welcome to participate.
Serendipity is, cannot and never will be a machine…or can it be a ‘society30 machine’ in a more holistic perspective ;-)) ??
I wish you good luck in Austin and I am sure you all have a great meet-up there!
To clarify, I loved the whole book but took issue with only one paragraph, this one:
“The level of serendipity a coworking space can achieve is constrained by its number of actual members. The membership model creates a natural barrier, turning a potentially open network into an internal and therefore somewhat closed community. Through the membership model, coworking spaces even run the risk of creating relatively exclusive community islands that, instead of exploiting their shared serendipity, weaken each other through unnecessary network competition.”
My point is that we have a fee-based membership model but don’t suffer from exclusivity OR unnecessary network competition. Never have.
has my comment disappeared?
No! I approved it earlier today but it didn’t show up. Will investigate.
@fccoworking:disqus : I see what you mean, however please realize that your experience is not ‘standard’. I can see where a community has a special feeling about themselves and form a tight group but still strongly connecting to the outside world, that this element can be minor, but again in general, any ‘member-based-group shows a tendency to cluster (tribalism), from showing off as ‘elite’ to become ‘a bastion’ to be taken by outsiders. We notice from all our global contacts that this is the case and forms almost a threat to the healthy development of the coworking movement. Also, we see places going under due to this effect. Nevertheless it is all part of the new game we have to learn and play!