Gleick invited everyone to participate in the discussion, and while he managed everything smoothly, the mindset gap between the lecturer and the audience was easy to notice.

Referring to his experience working as a science reporter for the New York Times, Gleick contrasted the old media world and its leading newspapers and journalists with the new googlized world and its drowned-in-information citizens.

If you haven’t had a chance to read his book on Information, reading his article titled How Google Dominates Us will give you a grasp of his ideas on this topic.

Although various points were discussed in that highly interactive session, I just want to draw your attention to one of the issues discussed there: the concept of serendipity.

Definition of Serendipity

The Oxford Dictionary has defined serendipity as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity from the Persian word Sarandib, referring to the old Persian fairy tale about three Sarandib princes who were always making accidental discoveries (Sarandib was Persian word for Sri Lanka).

The happy accident of discovery is another general description used for the word serendipity.

But in the context of the information and media, it’s easier and more helpful to consider serendipity as finding information which you were not looking for.

Referring to the old newspaper-age, Gleick provides a simple example of serendipity:

while reading the newspaper page by page, you see a short article about an event in a far country. You were not looking for such an article and never thought that it could be interesting for you, but now you are engaged with the article and may find it helpful or insightful.

Serendipity in the Digital Age

Because of their nature, serendipities were a common incident in the traditional media. Reading, watching and listening was linear and you had no other choice except following the content from the beginning to the end.

However, with the current digital tools and technologies, the user/audience has much more power in managing the inflow of information.

Most of search algorithms are proud of customized search results. Social media platforms filter the information and present you a handpicked set of the most relevant published content.

Filter bubble and echo chamber are coined to describe the situations where there is no chance of confronting with the serendipities.

As it is discussed in the video, someone may argue that the duty of the search engines is not to provide the user with the experience of serendipities. Users of the search engines, reach them with a specific question and expect to get the most relevant answer as fast as possible. Therefore, it’s the duty of the other institutions, such as universities and magazines, to make serendipities for their audience.

In his party controversial discussion, Gleick says that many users of the search engines, do not have a specific question in mind. They just start with a keyword and there’s still some room for providing unexpected answers for them (or at least consider a few serendipities in the search engine results page). But one of the attendees told him that usually, user refines its query and Google considers this back and forth communication as a dialogue. Therefore there’s no reason to derail such a purposeful conversation with irrelevant information called serendipity or whatsoever.

A Book about the Concept of Serendipity

While searching the web for the concept of serendipity, I learned that there’s a book dedicated to serendipity: Accidental Information Discovery.

I’ve just read a few pages of the book, but it seems to me that there are many fantastic ideas about the serendipity concept for anyone interested in this topic. The book is published in 2016, five years after the discussion of Gleick and Googlers in Mountain View.

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Subtitle: How technology is changing our minds for the better

Author: Clive Thompson (Canadian journalist / Technology blogger)

Author’s other books: –

Offical website of the book: smarterthanyouthink

No. of pages: 341

Publisher: Penguin Press (2013)

Hardcopy versions

Smarter than you think (Amazon)

Smarter than you think (Barnes&Noble)

Audio version: Audible / B&N

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

Related audio files

• An interview with Clive Thompson about the book and his perspective on technology

Selected reviews and interviews related to the book

• A review by Walter Isaacson, as he quotes many major ideas of the book, this article can help you to decide whether you like to put this book on your reading list.
• Brain Pickings’ review of the book (A very positive review by Maria Popova)
• NY Journal of Books recommends Thompson’s book as a must-read for anyone interested in internet culture
• Amplify’s interview with Clive Thompson about the book

Praises and endorsements

Clay Shirky: Thompson declares a winner in the cognitive fight between human and computers: both together. Smarter Than You Think is an eye-opening exploration of the ways computers think better with humans attached, and vice-versa.

Chris Anderson:  Almost without noticing it, the Internet has become our intellectual exoskeleton. Rather than just observing this evolution, Clive Thompson takes us to the people, places, and technologies driving it, bringing deep reporting, storytelling and analysis to one of the most profound shifts in human history.

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Title: The Lean Startup

Explanatory Title: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Publisher: Currency (Crown Publishing Group)

First Publication: 2011

ISBN / Pages: 978-0307887894 / 336 pages

Category: Entrepreneurship / Starting a new business / Startups

About the Lean Startup author | Eric Ries

Eric Ries, born in 1978, is a Yale graduate mostly known because of his now classic book “The Lean Startup.” The content of this book is mainly based on online posts he published earlier on his blog, Startup Lessons Learned.

Ries started his career journey as a programmer. After a few failures in various startups, IMVU was the first business that got real traction and received investment. Co-founded in 2004, IMVU remained in the market even till now. However, Ries stepped down from operational positions in 2008 and remained a board member. Most of what Ries has written in his books and preaches today as the lean method has roots in these successes and failures.

Over a decade, with the help of other friends, authors, and like-minded people, he has fine-tuned and furthered his Lean Philosophy or Lean Methodology model. Nowadays, many people worldwide believe that lean thinking, as a flexible and agile process, is a reliable model for leading startups through the path of success and growth.

Ries says that he has decided to devote himself full-time to the Lean Startup movement, the term he frequently uses to show his ideas’ vast, significant, and sustained effect.

The lean mindset

As Ries mentions several times in his book, the idea of The Lean Startup is inspired by lean thinking in Japan’s automotive industry, especially Toyota Manufacturing System. Lean thinking, in his words, means looking for value-creating processes and trying to eliminate waste.

But thinking lean in the startup world is much more complicated than in the automotive and other physical industries. It’s easier to find waste in a factory or most traditional businesses. But when you run a startup, you explore the uncharted waters of uncertainty.

This is the reason that he tries to integrate scientific thinking under the label of validated learning into his lean startup model. It should be noted that scientific thinking is much broader than what he refers to. And what he describes as scientific thinking is just an essential subset of the scientific paradigm: insisting on the importance of experiments.

Lean Startup meaning

Considering the above description, the Lean Startup is a method for developing a business or product using experimentation and iteration (Or, as Eric Ries calls it: The Build-measure-learn feedback loop). It’s based on learning and feedback instead of pre-planning, correction instead of perfection, and data instead of prediction.

Validated learning

In traditional businesses, with a known and stable environment, it’s easy to set a vision and define some milestones on the way. But startups are supposed to be operated in uncertainty. Otherwise, they won’t be called startupDefininging time-based milestones and allocating phase-based budgets are not meaningful and effective in such a situation.

Here’s one of the lean startup principles: Each case of validated learning should be considered as an achieved milestone on the way forward. Validated learning is so essential in the lean mindset that Ries literally equates it to the startup’s raison d’etre:

How the Lean Startup methodology differs from the traditional approach

The traditional approach to founding and developing a startup was akin to the classic entrepreneurship roadmap:

• Writing a detailed business plan (even if you are sure that you can’t stick to it)
• Making financial projections (even if you know that everything is uncertain)
• Designing and creating the perfect product in secret before making a full-force launch

In the traditional approach, in the early stages, the entrepreneur and business know everything about the product, and the market knows nothing about it. But in the so-called lean startup methodology, the business and the market are discovering (or somehow co-creating) the perfect product together in a never-ending path of experimentation and learning.

Selected sentences from the book

This book may not be suitable for you if…

Although Eric Ries believes that the application of lean startup ideas is not limited to startups, his book is heavily oriented towards online and digital businesses or at least businesses with a serious software core.

Therefore, if you are not running such a business, you can find similar or more valuable ideas in the books classified under the design thinking category. Or in other words, if you are already familiar with design thinking principles, The Lean Startup will not have too much to teach you.

The Lean Startup Summary

There are many different summarized versions of The Lean Startup on the web. Kim Hartman’s summary is one the most accurate and useful summaries accessible for free. As this file is about 30 pages long, it’s more than a summary, and it could be called a synopsis of the lean startup.

You can download a PDF version of the summary either from his website or the link below (also available in ePub format):

The Lean Startup Summary (PDF)

The Lean Startup Summary (ePub)

Selected book reviews

10 Years Since ‘The Lean Startup’ (Forbes | Ryan Gray)

Book Review: The Lean Startup (Financial Times | Philip Delves Broughton)

Links for buying the book

The Lean Startup (Paperback) – Amazon

The Lean Startup (Audiobook) – Audible

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