What Spider Monkeys Can Teach Us About Serendipity

A group of researchers has spent more than a decade following spider monkeys through the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula. The aim was not to romanticise animal behaviour, but to understand something quite precise: how these monkeys consistently find food in an environment where resources are patchy, seasonal, and constantly changing.

What they uncovered is unexpectedly relevant far beyond primatology.

Spider monkeys live in what biologists call a fission-fusion society. The group does not move as a single, stable unit. Instead, it continually breaks apart into small subgroups and recombines in different configurations. Individuals drift in and out of one another’s company over hours and days, sometimes travelling alone, sometimes in small clusters.

At first glance, this looks inefficient. Why not stick together? Why not share all information all the time?

The answer, it turns out, is that this social structure allows the group to do something no individual can: build a collective, constantly updated understanding of where food is likely to be found.

Each monkey has deep knowledge of a particular part of the forest-certain fruit trees, certain seasonal patterns, certain routes. No monkey knows everything. But through repeated mixing, partial overlaps, and chance encounters, information spreads. Knowledge is neither centralised nor evenly distributed. It is fragmented, redundant in some places, unique in others-and critically, recombined through social interaction.

The researchers modelled this not just as a set of pairwise relationships, but as a higher-order network: a structure that captures how multiple individuals’ knowledge overlaps simultaneously. What emerges is a system that balances exploration and exploitation remarkably well. Some monkeys range widely and encounter novelty. Others revisit known areas. The group as a whole adapts to change better than any individual possibly could.

In other words, what looks like “lucky foraging” is anything but luck.

Serendipity as a system property

Reading this work, what struck me most forcefully was how familiar the structure felt.

We often talk about serendipity as if it were an accident-something that happens to individuals at moments of insight or inspiration. A chance meeting. A lucky break. A conversation that unexpectedly changes direction.

But the spider monkeys suggest a different interpretation. Serendipity is not primarily an individual phenomenon. It is a property of systems that allow diverse, partial knowledge to circulate and recombine.

Each monkey is, in effect, a locally prepared mind. Prepared not in the sense of brilliance or genius, but in the sense of deep familiarity with a particular domain. The social system ensures that these prepared minds encounter one another repeatedly, in different combinations, without anyone directing the process.

What emerges from those encounters-better routes, better timing, better decisions-appears serendipitous only if one ignores the underlying structure.

Why efficiency kills discovery

There is an important implication here.

If the spider monkeys were organised for maximum efficiency in the narrow sense-fixed subgroups, rigid territories, minimal overlap-the system would fail. Information would stagnate. Local shocks (a failed fruiting season, a damaged tree) would propagate poorly. Adaptation would slow.

The very features that look inefficient from a distance-redundancy, overlap, repeated mixing, time spent in apparently unproductive encounters-are what make the system robust.

This has uncomfortable parallels with many human institutions.

In business, government, and policy, we have become very good at eliminating what looks like waste: unstructured time, informal networks, overlapping roles, conversations without a clear agenda. We reward clarity, predictability, and linear accountability. We optimise for short-term efficiency.

What we quietly remove in the process is the capacity for collective intelligence.

The myth of the heroic individual

Another striking aspect of the spider-monkey system is the absence of anything resembling leadership in the conventional sense. No individual directs the group. No one has a privileged overview. Success does not depend on identifying the “best” monkey.

The outcome emerges from interaction, not instruction.

This aligns poorly with the way we often tell stories about innovation and discovery. We prefer narratives of exceptional individuals and decisive moments. They are tidy and emotionally satisfying. But they systematically misdescribe how progress actually happens in complex environments.

Breakthroughs-scientific, technological, or institutional-are far more often the result of multiple partial insights colliding in the right conditions. The conditions matter at least as much as the people.

Serendipity is older than humans

Perhaps the most important lesson here is a humbling one.

Serendipity is not a management technique. It is not a cultural artefact. It is not a mindset we can simply exhort people to adopt.

It is an evolved response to uncertainty.

Long before humans built laboratories, companies, or governments, complex systems faced the same problem: how to function effectively when information is incomplete, resources are unevenly distributed, and the future cannot be predicted. The spider monkeys’ solution-distributed knowledge, continual recombination, and tolerance of apparent inefficiency-works because it preserves optionality.

That insight travels remarkably well.

Whether we are designing innovation ecosystems, research institutions, or policy processes, the question is not how to eliminate chance, but how to structure systems so that chance encounters become productive rather than destructive.

The rainforest has been running that experiment for a very long time.

And it seems to know something we are still in danger of forgetting.

Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen by Accident is available to purchase here.