Serendipity Loves a Funnel: Why it doesn’t happen by accident
Nearly fifty years ago, my wife and I coaxed an ageing Hillman Husky across the Skye ferry to visit a remote distillery. Standing at the locked gates, we bumped into our Cambridge neighbours - 570 miles from home. Pure coincidence? Not quite.
The soot‑blackened buildings where Talisker was crafted were barely visible across the high wall. Heavy swing gates were chained shut, and the damp air hung over what felt like a deserted site. As we stood disappointed at the gates a knot of backpack‑laden hikers appeared, trudging down the unmade road that snaked through the trees down from the Cuillin Mountains. To our astonishment they were three of the students who rented the house next door to ours on Riverside in Cambridge. That serendipitous meeting remains my favourite early demonstration of what I would later call engineered serendipity - the deliberate design of circumstances that make so‑called lucky encounters almost inevitable.
At first blush bumping into our neighbours sounds like the stuff of pub‑quiz probability puzzles. What are the odds? We instinctively file it under fluke and carry on. Yet when the merely curious (I rank myself there) look under the bonnet, the astonishment thins.
Serendipity loves a funnel
Even in those quieter days Skye had very few focal points: a smattering of inns, a single main road, and a dozen or so recommended sights and hikes. Talisker was one of them precisely because it was out of the way; visitors converged on it the way moths find a porch light in an otherwise dark garden, and the distillery would make full use of this in later years. Add the ferry timetables (no bridge, remember) and the limited beds available on the island, and you discover that travellers' routes and timetables synchronised more tightly than they realised. Strip away the romance and our meeting begins to look less like cosmic alignment and more like two pinballs nudged along the same narrow guide rails.
This doesn't cheapen the magic; it only changes the trick. Serendipity flourishes because latent structure - networks, timetables, rituals - pushes diverse people into shared spaces. Chance alone rarely delivers discovery; it needs a stage and some props. Alexander Fleming's untidy desk was one such stage. The cramped corridors of MIT's Building 20 were another. So was Talisker's shuttered courtyard on that warm summer morning.
Every contact leaves a trace
Years later, when I created the Centre for Science and Policy in Cambridge, the vision was to enable serendipity by deliberately designing a system that promoted these kinds of encounters - bringing together policymakers and researchers who might never otherwise meet. My hunch was that each brief contact leaves an invisible residue, a trace that primes future collisions. Record enough traces and the odds of a "lucky" breakthrough soar.
Skye illustrated that principle in hiking boots; our neighbours and we had chatted vaguely about visiting the western isles. That kind of holiday suited students on tight budgets (I was a student myself at the time). The real surprise would have been not meeting.
Why we miss the obvious
If serendipity thrives on structure, why do we claim it is inexplicable? Partly because the relevant patterns are too large for one observer. Social networks are vast, overlapping, and dynamic; our brains are terrific at storytelling but hopeless at multi‑layer probability. We cling to the language of miracle because it absolves us from analysis. Unfortunately, that attitude infects organisations. A senior civil servant once warned me against using the word serendipity because it indicated I didn’t know what I was talking about. By pretending uncertainty doesn't exist, he guaranteed the system would miss surprises - good and bad alike.
Louis Pasteur's line, "Chance favours the prepared mind," isn't a paean to laboratory neatness; it's an invitation to cultivate awareness. Preparation means noticing the funnel, recognising the trace, and greeting the improbable with a raised eyebrow rather than a slack jaw.
How to create more serendipity
What does a prepared life look like?
Widen the funnel. Attend events outside your silo, linger in liminal spaces, take the sleeper instead of the shuttle flight. Diversity of routine multiplies intersections.
Leave traces generously. Introduce people, share draft ideas, ask genuine questions. Each interaction is a breadcrumb for future paths to follow.
Stay politely curious. When coincidence strikes, don't merely repeat it at dinner parties. Ask which hidden rails guided the meeting - and how you might lay more of them.
None of this is metaphysics; it is network science and a pinch of behavioural economics wearing hiking boots.
A modest proposal
Imagine if we built cities, offices - even government departments - with intentional serendipity in mind: layouts that force interdisciplinary mingling, policies that allow exploratory space, calendars that tolerate the productive digression. The world would still be unpredictable, but our odds of stumbling upon penicillin‑level breakthroughs - or simply meeting the right co‑founder over lunch - would improve markedly.
One more thought...
Skye and Talisker remind me that serendipitous moments are rarely accidents at all. They're the visible tip of an iceberg - mostly structure, a dash of timing, and someone awake enough to spot the glint.
If this strikes a chord, you'll find many more such stories - and the underlying framework - in my new book, Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen by Accident, launching on 25 June. Meanwhile, your own serendipitous encounters probably weren't accidents either. The patterns are there if you know where to look. After all, every contact leaves a trace - and the next one might just lead somewhere unexpected.
David Cleevely is a serial technology entrepreneur and author. He prefers single‑malt serendipity to blended certainty.