The Power of Serendipity in Technology with Daniel W Rasmus

Exploring the Serendipity Economy with Daniel W Rasmus

In this episode of The Human Code, host Don Finley discusses the 'serendipity economy' with Daniel W Rasmus, founder and principal analyst at Serious Insights. The conversation explores a new framework for measuring value creation beyond traditional productivity metrics, emphasizing the long-term impacts of technology and AI on work and personal growth. Daniel highlights how serendipitous opportunities can emerge from expanded human connections via technology, advocating for a shift in focus from immediate productivity gains to maximizing potential interactions. The episode also dives into how AI can facilitate unexpected collaborative outcomes, challenging conventional productivity-focused mindsets. Listeners are encouraged to consider how to integrate serendipity into their daily lives and business strategies.

00:00 Introduction to The Human Code 

00:49 Guest Introduction: Daniel W. Rasmus 

01:04 Exploring the Serendipity Economy 

02:32 Challenges of Measuring Productivity 

04:01 Real-World Examples and Insights 

08:23 Adopting a Serendipitous Mindset 

14:25 The Role of AI in the Serendipity Economy 

27:20 Leadership and Value Creation 

35:03 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Welcome to the Serendipity Economy Paper

Sponsored by FINdustries
Hosted by Don Finley

Transcript

Don Finley: 0:00

Welcome to The Human Code, the podcast where technology meets humanity, and the future is shaped by the leaders and innovators of today. I'm your host, Don Finley, inviting you on a journey through the fascinating world of tech, leadership, and personal growth. Here, we delve into the stories of visionary minds, Who are not only driving technological advancement, but also embodying the personal journeys and insights that inspire us all. Each episode, we explore the intersections where human ingenuity meets the cutting edge of technology, unpacking the experiences, challenges, and triumphs that define our era. So, whether you are a tech enthusiast, an inspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the human narratives behind the digital revolution, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Human Code. In today's episode, we're excited to welcome back. Daniel w Rasmus, founder and principal analyst. That's serious insights. Daniel is a visionary and strategic planning and thought leader on the future of work and AI. This time, Daniel and I dive into the concept of the serendipity economy. A new way of thinking about value creation behind traditional productivity measures. The importance of measuring longterm value and outcomes rather than just immediate productivity gains. And how AI can serve as a conduit for serendipity, connecting people with new ideas and insights while helping us navigate the uncertainties of the modern tech landscape. Tune in as Daniel challenges, conventional thinking and offers a fresh perspective on how we can harness technology for deeper, more impactful outcomes in our work and lives. You won't want to miss this thought provoking conversation. welcome. We have Daniel Rasmus with us again, and we had such an interesting conversation the first time, Daniel, that I'm really glad to have you back. But today's conversation is really going to start with the aspect of the serendipity economy and how that plays into our role. understanding that today we're in one economy and with the inclusion of AI and the, extreme focus on productivity that we were talking about earlier, it seems like we need to take a step back and look at like how we actually want to be participating in our work and in our play, that comes about. And so, Given that this is your baby, I would love to hear more about it from you directly as to, what that serendipity economy is.

Daniel W Rasmus: 2:28

Sure. thanks Don for having me back and I appreciate the conversation. Yeah, I've been frustrated for years, having worked for a number of technology companies, that often and almost exclusively they look at productivity as the way that they sell their products, So they say, we're gonna save you X amount of time timeee, the hard drives are faster, the keyboards are more ergonomic. The software gives you more tools for doing something in a shorter period of time, and they often will measure, the benefit of the new version of something in, if it's a hard drive, in milliseconds or micro, and then it's seconds or days or hours that accumulate for software. So if you're talking about things like, Microsoft 365 or SAP implementation or something like that. There's always that we've created new tools to make you more productive. and I always found that frustrating, because I think there were a lot of things that technology did, that were hard to measure. To your point, if there's one economy, I think there's actually multiple economies that happen simultaneously, we just don't pay attention to all of them, So, the software providers pay attention to productivity because they can do studies ahead of a product coming out and say, We implemented this feature, this feature improved upon this activity, and here is the result of that feature's new capability, So, we saved you 30 seconds. Per day because we now read your emails for you or whatever the case may be. However, if you look at, the thing I started deconstructing was, I'll give you a worked example with a presentation, So I create a presentation and I do get the benefit of the new version of PowerPoint or the new version of Google Sheets. I get a benefit from productivity. I am creating a sales presentation and I know you do those, sales presentation is three weeks from now. Great that I was productive, but what does that mean to the overall value chain of the business now that the presentation is three weeks from now, I now give that presentation let's say it doesn't go so well. I don't end up getting any leads out of that sales talk that I do, what's the value of that productivity? The real value was that the presentation landed and actually generated leads that turned into sales that happened over some longer period of time. And so we don't tend to measure that. You don't see calculations from Microsoft or from Google that say, we're helping you create presentations that land better messages and convert into revenue, We saved you some time in a short period of time that you created the thing, but the economic value of that is much longer, Okay.

Don Finley: 5:16

which is interesting because there's probably many ways to measure productivity, and you're giving the example of, it was a PowerPoint deck for a sales presentation. And, you let's just say I got it done 50 percent faster using the tool, really productivity, employers will probably look at it like dollars per hour. measurement or somewhere along those lines. And I think what you're pointing out is that productivity of time savings doesn't directly lead to actually like dollars being created or value being created and effectiveness of the time in the tool.

Daniel W Rasmus: 5:50

right, so when you talk about the measuring of productivity, I talk about it as being distinct and different from the value realization that comes from the product that you create, right? and then that, Other principles in the serendipity economy are that it's displaced in time, So it may be a week or a month, if I'm doing an academic paper, there's a whole backup of the, you've got to get this in and peer reviewed and blah, blah, blah, before you get to give the presentation that quote unquote changes people's thinking about the world, And again, lots of Tools involved in the meantime, and then you give your presentation and maybe it does change the way people think about the universe or the economy or whatever it is that you're having this discussion about. but you've already moved past where the software people are having the conversation. You've already moved past that piece, Of, creation of the content. and so being able to think about, and then the serendipity economy also brings into that larger, part of a value chain of knowledge. Present. To a number of people, So it's now becomes the PowerPoint presentation and the projector and all these other things. And maybe I'm doing it through Zoom or some other collaborative tool. And so now I've got these tools that are stacking up and all of them are gaining value by permitting me to have a bigger impact on this idea that I might have had in the print era,

Don Finley: 7:16

Gotcha.

Daniel W Rasmus: 7:17

again, nobody pays attention to me, So it's all happened after the fact. All the tools are segmented with their own little, I can get online faster with Zoom, or I can talk to X number of people. But what was the value that came out of that conversation, So if I were Zoom, I would think about It's not the number of meetings I facilitated. What kind of value have I created out of the meetings that have happened through my platform, I created a platform that shrunk the world. And now I'm thinking because of that, I've now created a value, that, it needs to be measured, And I think we, it's a hard, it's a hard task and that's probably the reason they avoid it,

Don Finley: 7:57

I mean, as humans in general, we're lazy.

Daniel W Rasmus: 7:59

Yeah,

Don Finley: 7:59

minimum thing that we need to do to survive is what ends up occurring, and I, like myself, love rest, so it can go, but I love the hard problem of this, because it really changes the mindset around how we can look at things, and at the same time, it's more holistic in regards to like, how are we helping out the people that we're engaging, as well. So do you have any insights on like, how as individuals we can adopt a serendipitous mindset or serendipity economy mindset into our daily lives and our businesses?

Daniel W Rasmus: 8:36

Yeah. so one of the other principles is that you have to have external validation and I'll go back to the sales presentation, So if I do the sales presentation and let's say I take a survey and I say, did this presentation change your mind and make you more positive about the product that was being presented to you? And you say, yes, 80 percent of the people say yes. Then the presentation landed, So again, it's this I already created it I've taken all of those productivity gains, but from a value chain standpoint, I've now Touched X number of people and I've changed 80 percent of those people's mindset to be more positive about my product. That's a valuable thing, On the flip side of that, on the next level, I'm now doing phone calls into those people or emails or whatever, and I'm now taking those people and converting them into revenue. I can personally build, if I own the sales chain of a business. I can start building that up and saying that, the return on my technology investment. So I've got my office suite or whatever we want to call it these days, my collaborative platform, my CRM. And, there's a constant, even with AI now we're starting to get the, where's the productivity in AI, how's and it's not just the, did I read emails faster? Did I create a piece of copy for a website faster? It's the, did anybody read that copy? Did it convert them into going from the disinterested to interested? Did you get put into a different part of the funnel? and they do some of that, So a business may actually do some of this stuff. But again, when this came to me, it was as a technology vendor. I don't take credit for any of that, Although I'm part of that value chain, I've given up after I've said, I made you more productive. I've stopped looking, And individual businesses may look and talk about those things, but they don't. Go back because they're not vendors. They don't care if Microsoft gets credit for them having a great sales year, So they don't go. Hey Microsoft. Thanks for doing that. They may renew their license and say yeah, we know that was part of the equation But so the discussions that we have about value chains and in the value of technology investments, I think are Very truncated when it comes to the technology vendors doing that

Don Finley: 10:53

an interesting question to be asking because I know, we're doing some of our deals on a revenue share basis, And so that kind of pushes us a little bit further down the value chain creation, but I don't think it's as fully encompassing of what you're talking about for how an economic outlook. Would be, is that like a step in the direction towards the serendipity economy, or is that, just still in that productivity based mindset?

Daniel W Rasmus: 11:19

Yeah, let me go back to, why I pick serendipity is the thing is because the technology enables you to have more encounters, that's where the serendipity comes in, And we're not measuring the serendipitous piece of the technology investment, So if I use Zoom as another example, I can now reach X number more people than I could if I was in a room that held 50 people at a hotel. So I now have 1, 500 people. I've increased the opportunity for Serendipity to happen because I've increased the, number of people that I could talk to with that message, So in some ways I talk about it when I talk about expansion but it's really a compression, because I think about technology as the, of a balloon that you're compressing. There's All of the potential customers that you could have, and you're actually able to touch more of them, You're compressing and the technology is making connections easier to make, And so that's you know, that's where the Opportunity for collaborative technology to add to the value chain. Again, it often gets dismissed because it's not purely productive, You talk about, things like, how quickly you can message somebody or something, but the real value is in the making the connections, And so I think that's where the serendipity really comes from, is being able to make more of those. connections and finding ways of creating value that you couldn't have discovered before, Because that you had physical limitations of kind of real world scenarios and I still get, the, hi, it's an investment thing. Come to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and we'll buy you a dinner and talk to you about your investment portfolio,

Don Finley: 13:05

Yep.

Daniel W Rasmus: 13:05

That's a very limited, right? Mail in some ways acts as that conduit, what if I was on a webinar with that person or a podcast versus I have to make the choice to go drive over to a steakhouse to have a dinner and that limits the number of people that I can touch. I may have extended my reach with the invitations or I may have extended my reach with the invitations. But I didn't extend the reach message, right? message is still limited to, 12 or 20 or 50 people sitting around a table. And things like you're doing, us having this discussion, hopefully there will be more people going up. Serendipity economy, never thought about that before. And that will generate things that we didn't expect would ever happen with the conversation that we're having right now.

Don Finley: 13:50

And I think that's a good example, Like you and I are having a one on one conversation that we'll end up sharing this with, tens of thousands of people, and hopefully some of them will actually get some bit of value from this, but really where I'm coming back to this at is it's almost like the statement of, what is it about luck? It's basically luck is just the activity of being prepared,

Daniel W Rasmus: 14:11

Yeah.

Don Finley: 14:11

And with the serendipity, it's about opening up those multiple points of opportunity for us to have a connection that may, lead to conversations like this between others or for you to provide your value. and then how do you maximize that? And I think that the potent Question of like how AI comes into this or how that technology can help to do it is really about how do we align, you and I getting together. Whereas the AI could be effectively sharing our knowledge with other AIs to help to line up these human components.

Daniel W Rasmus: 14:46

yeah, that's, absolutely a piece of it. But I think AI, not to go too far down that, rabbit hole yet, but the, you I think AI also has the opportunity because it has ingested so much of the ideas of the world. When you ask it a good question, it can act as a serendipity conduit, So these questions that we're getting right now about the why is AI not productive? But if I think about it, there are, yes, it does still have issues with making things up. But if I think about it in a constrained learning model, and I'm asking it questions, and it's telling me things about, wing design in an airplane, or how large language models work, or, how to, put applications in a cloud or whatever those things are. It's also now taking knowledge that it's taken from other places and giving that to me and giving me references back to it and, when it's acting it's giving you the right references due to real things. It's acting as a conduit for the serendipity. It's exposing me to things that I may want to go pursue. and I think that takes us to one of the other aspects of the serendipity economy, which is you can't forecast, So again, one of the hard things for a technology company, it's very easy to say time and time again, we did this study and we did multiple studies and I can prove the productivity. I can't tell you that the presentation that you gave or the research that you conducted or the collaborative conversations that you, had will turn into anything. If they do turn into something, I can't tell you what the magnitude of that thing is going to be, There's no way to forecast, the serendipity outcome, So it's always going to be looking through the rear view mirror if, when you put numbers on it, because we can go back and say, we had these conversations, they led to this thing, and then we can go back and trace. we had this conversation through a Slack channel that led to a Zoom meeting that led to this presentation to these people that generated these leads that did these things, And we can put the technology stack back into the equation afterwards, but nobody sitting there initially creating a presentation or having a conversation in Slack would go, Oh, that's what's going to happen after we're done with this, And that's where it's very different from productivity. So we're not sure where the things and the sparks and the connections are going to happen, you have to deconstruct it. And again, even technology companies taking a little bit of that and building that into their story, I think is more valuable than just concentrating on productivity. Yep.

Don Finley: 17:22

I, grasp, or at least I feel like I do, of what you're talking about, because it's the serendipitous aspect that you're relating here is that you may not under, truly understand what the value creation that you're doing in this moment is. quite possibly is, but you can measure the amount of opportunity that you have for that value to be created. So if I'm creating a sales presentation, and let's just say today I create a sales presentation for every single client, Like it's unique. It goes along with my ADHD, and it has 18 different messages across 18 different clients, but at the same time, it's personalized, it's unique, and it goes, but it takes, a couple hours for each. sales presentation to create it. But if I condense those messages across, and let's just say I use technology or a tool to help me consolidate the similarities to minimize the differences to go ahead, like that tool would help me to increase my serendipitous productivity because I could now broadcast that same message to an audience of 100, 150 instead of the audience of one that I. previously had, that would increase the opportunity for serendipitous, events to occur.

Daniel W Rasmus: 18:44

And again, that's disconnected from even the use of the tool in that way because you still have to schedule those meetings, deliver the presentation and all that kind of stuff. So there are other elements that are involved in that. because at the end of the day, you could say, I'm going to run my PowerPoint presentations through an AI and say, come up with a consolidated message in one day. One outline that's the presentation and then you never give it to anybody, that productivity is lost, Who cares that you did that, It's until you do that next step and then you see did it actually work, Because it could have screwed it up and your other approach may have been better, But you don't know that until you actually do it. But I think you're right. I think if you did do that and you had more open conversations with bigger groups of people, you would have a much larger opportunity for having connections and serendipity take place than if you just did one on one, you know, one to one marketing.

Don Finley: 19:36

and if I bring it back to the PowerPoint presentation kind of creation, Like with the presentation creation, I'm currently being really efficient in the creation of 18 different.

Daniel W Rasmus: 19:50

Absolutely.

Don Finley: 19:51

but in the same or 18 different presentations. And then if I was able to consolidate it down to one presentation, that one tool would basically, not, they would still have the productivity gains around that one presentation, but in a serendipitous way, that tool was involved in the process of enabling me to talk to 18 people at once or 150 or increasing that. However, and okay, that's an interesting way to, start looking at either the tasks or the objectives that we're going after, because I know from our sales pipeline, we know that If we book X number of phone calls that we are likely going to be booking, the Y amount of revenue. And so I know that every time I pick up the phone that, I'm making a couple dollars is really what that aspect looks like in this frame of reference or frame of mind. I'm looking at how do I effectively utilize my time to increase the opportunity for connection,

Daniel W Rasmus: 20:51

More connections. Right.

Don Finley: 20:52

more connections.

Daniel W Rasmus: 20:54

So I think it's also, a, individual sales call model. And then do they go into a community pipeline? Do those people talk to each other? and how do you have a conversation with them? That's bigger than the, here's the call to action. That's part of the script and the, I got to get you to convert this into some particular thing. after that, conversation happens, those other connections of that person going, oh yeah, I'm sure you see this in your business, of the, you came in for one particular thing, they talked to some other people in the business, and you end up getting follow on work inside of the same company because there were conversations. That's completely serendipitous,

Don Finley: 21:34

Oh, that's a great example. Cause we all have that, the opportunities that exist when we get our foot in the door and then land and expand kind of approach. But

Daniel W Rasmus: 21:42

Right.

Don Finley: 21:43

most of the time, yeah, no matter how diligent you are, there is a serendipitous moment of somebody at a water cooler having a conversation, or the office. work is significantly changed over the last four years.

Daniel W Rasmus: 21:55

Right. but yeah, and then think about the, if you had a CRM tool that allowed you to help move some of those conversations along and make more introductions, that tool could take credit for more than, you making sales calls more efficiently, most of them I don't think know how to do that. Right.

Don Finley: 22:17

no, I think they, this is also near and dear. we're switching CRMs at this moment. getting much more familiar in every piece of CRM technology than I, have been in the past. And there is the aspect of productivity. There's the aspect of, tracking. to be insured, but there isn't that aspect or I haven't found the feature yet that enables that impact to grow or finds the areas that can help you on your own to grow it too. really,

Daniel W Rasmus: 22:49

I think there is a feature that, when you talk about just the sales person or the account manager, capturing the, this person said you should talk to that person. and which ones of those actually turn into leads and which one of those turns into revenue. Again, I think part of that is the CRM company. doesn't recognize that or know how to quantify it because, again, it's not forecastable. They can't say every business gets this or whatever, it's there, it happens, but they don't message that because it's hard to forecast and they just don't bring it up, again, that's where I think the tech companies leave money on the table is not bringing up some of these bigger examples that are both hard to measure, but could be. in retrospective measured and could be made into business cases or use cases. and they don't make that final mile or final leap into what all of the things their technology is used for.

Don Finley: 23:45

which is interesting because I was reviewing agent assist, AI chatbots basically, and for our audience, agent assist is the process of, you have a call center and you stick an AI next to that person. And it allows the AI to solve the problem while the agent is communicating with the end client, And the pricing model for this one solution was basically a dollar for every case resolved. And it was interesting. It was definitely on the value creation side. Hey, we've got to solve this case. But at the same time, my one question was like, what about the cases that shouldn't be solved, Like where's the motivation to be solving the proper case or like a good case and then saying, you know what, we're not even going to touch this one. but at the same time, if we have technology that is looking at the serendipity of it.

Daniel W Rasmus: 24:36

Well, in that case, to me, it would be the if it's looking at all of the solutions, which ones are common that you shouldn't pay a dollar for every time because it's resolving the same problem, And so it should be doing pattern matching and saying, here are the list of the ones that every time this kind of thing happens, this is the answer. And you don't have to pay a dollar for that one anymore. That's just the retrieval thing. And I pushed that one to you because I as an AI, I didn't have to think about it. but I think there again, to me, the serendipity economy would come into the, can I do higher order problems, Does that get pushed out? And, I just went through this yesterday with my friends, I'll say Xfinity, and I'm still not sure what it is that I paid for my bill, but I talked to a robot, a human through text and two phone calls. And I sort of got my problem resolved, but I'm not sure they learned anything from that experience, And so Being able to think about the, what can you learn from customers, which was a study I did a few years ago, on instant messaging at Red Robin around the serendipity economy, where they were actually learning things from customers and making changes to menu items and processes. And again, because they had a tool that was giving them visibility into all of this and real time conversation, They were able to learn and apply the lessons, to the business. and again, the tool gave them the opportunity to do that. And I will say in a more serendipitous way, then, did somebody fill out a card and the cart go into the pile? And did we read the cards and write, this was real time stuff that was a combination of both. Corporate IT, corporate process, local store, in store operations, that was able to do it much faster than if you'd had a manual process or just word of mouth, somebody said something to the waitress or waiter or waitstaff or whatever, so giving direct the technology facilitated learning in a serendipitous way.

Don Finley: 26:34

every time you talk about this, it opens up new pathways for me. And so I like really appreciate this conversation because putting some wrinkles in the brain.

Daniel W Rasmus: 26:42

Okay.

Don Finley: 26:43

from the standpoint of if we look at productivity today, I think we look at it as a rather transactional. it is a very, here's where it starts. Here's where it stops. And there's some sort of exchange that goes into it. But even if we step out of that paradigm that we've been looking at, the value creation of the serendipity is really what you're looking at. And so it is that higher order magnitude of relation to the work being involved, but that second order question of Hey, What does this work mean to myself? What does this work mean to my customers? What does this work mean to the community? Is those like meta questions around the work to be asking.

Daniel W Rasmus: 27:20

Yeah, and I'm not sure I addressed that with the serendipity economy, but I think Because we don't have the conversations about the value of the work you do, it goes back to, as we talked before the call about Upwork talk in their recent study of people now feeling burned out because they're being asked to go back to work, gain new skills, work harder, and integrate AI into their work, and all those kinds of things that are now Potentially making them less productive because they're being asked to do things that aren't their real job. and one of my observations there always are they actually being measured and compensated for the expectations that you're setting on them, but I think those Having better view of the economics of the value, So am I a content creator just creating a presentation and the expectation is I can create more presentations or fancier presentations or whatever in less time versus I'm part of a value chain that's actually Creating value for the business. In strategy, one of the hardest things to do is ask somebody, two or three or four levels down from the office of the CEO, what's our strategy and how are you a part of that? If you can make some of these equations, you can have that discussion, I do this, and here's how it impacts. Businesses, again, in sales in some places, maybe in manufacturing, there's pieces of that happen, but not holistically, not in a way that actually can relate to the person that says, I'm part of the overall value that this organization is giving to the world. And it may be revenue, it may be, helping the environment. It may be helping with social issues. Again, what the value is not important. It's that we actually understand how to connect the work you're doing. to the value that they're creating. and, again, I think businesses and tech companies both miss that opportunity to have those conversations in which then, I think, reflects on how people feel about the work they do.

Don Finley: 29:25

but in the same token, you're highlighting a point that basically our satisfaction with the work that we do and in general

Daniel W Rasmus: 29:32

Yep.

Don Finley: 29:33

is not high and you're talking about having a sense of purpose. that aligns with what the company is doing and really how that individual contributor feeds into it. And you're right. If you are four levels away from the C suite, you likely don't have a strong association with that strategy unless there has been a diligent campaign effort. by those four levels above you to make sure that everybody understands their importance, amongst the team. And I think that's something that we can all take away from this conversation is to ensure that like our teams are, understanding what our strategy is, what our plan is, how their role is important to the success of the organization as well, and

Daniel W Rasmus: 30:16

and I think that's the hard part.

Don Finley: 30:19

but it is,

Daniel W Rasmus: 30:20

it's easy to say our strategy is this and we have these goals and objectives. It's hard to say how do you personally contribute to that, and then when you have of layoffs and rightsizing and all these other things, do you demonstrate that you have a value versus just saying it,

Don Finley: 30:37

well, and I think that's core thing. I had a mentor a while back and she said, as a leader, you have a gun. Point it at your head and there's one bullet in it and it's in a chamber. You don't know which one, but every time you make a decision for the team, you pull the trigger. And this kind of has a similar sort of realm to it of Hey, you got to understand the value that you're creating inside your organization is along the lines of ensuring that your team understands their role in your strategy or in the organization's strategy. And one step farther than that is to essentially ensure buy in

Daniel W Rasmus: 31:16

Yep.

Don Finley: 31:16

as well of the members that's their place.

Daniel W Rasmus: 31:19

Yeah, and to circle back to the serendipity economy, I would argue that some of the other chambers are full of seeds and nutrients, and so every time you make a decision, it could be a bad decision and you die, but it could also be a great decision and you've nurtured something and made something new, that people didn't expect, it's not always the bad side.

Don Finley: 31:39

Yeah, that's an entirely different rabbit hole. But at the same time, I agree with you. And I think that's why some leaders and young managers find it easy to, be essentially dictating or telling their teams. Here's what the answer is. Here's how to solve the problem. and I've noticed this when I've fallen into those traps that I end up getting teams that come to me more often. Like they rely on myself and part of it feels good, Like you're desired, you're wanted, but as a leader, I'm not really developing leadership in the team when we go about that. I think that's my that second order of productivity is really how many leaders I can create in the organization or even outside of the organization as well.

Daniel W Rasmus: 32:18

Yeah. And part of it comes down to personal stuff, I ran a team at an aerospace company and we decided we were going to empower people. and that part of the profile of empowerment was, Kind of the less interaction you had with your manager, the better. We wanted you, we set some goals and objectives and we said, go out and solve those. And I had one guy who came to my office every morning and said, what do you want me to do today, Dan? And I tell him, after reminding him that he was empowered and didn't need to do that. And then he got, for the first time in his career, he got basically a C. He got a average review and he said, but I did everything you told me. And I said, exactly. You made me tell you. You made me work when you knew what the answer was and you came to me anyway, and that was not what we said the work was now. We wanted you to be empowered, go work with your peers and create value and do the right thing, so sometimes as much as you try and you do the messaging and and even there was peer examples of people doing the right things, he didn't get it.

Don Finley: 33:19

And as I've expanded my career, you go on from managing technical resources to managing creative resources to managing, other types of resources in different spaces. and additionally, the organization sometimes have been entirely different. Like at one point I was running two businesses. And I noticed that my leadership style worked very well for one, and like really enabled and unlocked additional value to be created by that team. And for another, My leadership style was almost the downfall for that organization. And it's, having an understanding and having enough self awareness to realize that I had to change how I was adapting because that feedback was showing me that it wasn't working. and sometimes it was a really hard hit across the face that it wasn't working, but at the same token, I think, You're highlighting the importance in these, new relations to be really attuned to what the market is telling you.

Daniel W Rasmus: 34:13

Yep. Leadership is not generic. the hardest thing for a leader is to come off of a really good experience and come into an environment like that where you go, what I just did and was very successful doing for five years at this company and building all this stuff. And I do the same thing over here. Not working, Because the business and the culture and what they want to do is very different, And, and in some ways that's, they made it, they made the wrong hire. it wasn't, they should have known that. although they had hope, maybe they recognized that they had some issues and they were hoping that you would modify it. But, usually if you're not coming in at a C level, that's very hard to perturb the status quo,

Don Finley: 34:54

executives to perturb the status quo. yeah, there's, and especially when you bring them in from the outside, if the ship needs a course correction,

Daniel W Rasmus: 35:03

Yeah.

Don Finley: 35:03

yeah, Now, is there anything that I haven't asked you about the serendipity economy that we would all benefit from knowing here.

Daniel W Rasmus: 35:10

I don't think so. we've gone far in the field. I'm looking at my notes. the, I think the other thing to think about is that it happens anywhere, So that There's no place to say this is where the serendipity economy is of value. It is pervasive in all of the things that we do and all of the connections and kinds of work that we do. and over the course of time, it makes it hard to, again, forecast the future. What the future is going to be, which then ties back to our previous conversation around scenarios, So I see these as synergistic, if you have a hard time forecasting the future, that means a lot of uncertainty, which means you better know how to think about uncertainty. productivity is about certainty, It's the, I can do the same thing over and over. If we buy into the serendipity economy, you're buying into a certain level of uncertainty and sometimes a great level of uncertainty, that's not just the social, technological, economic, environmental. it's a level down from that. to the real work that you're doing in the environment that you do have some control over, but it's still uncertain. And so being able to be an agile thinker and recognize that you have to navigate what's in front of you rather than just navigating what you hope is in front of you or what you've been told it's in front of you or what you think should be in front of you, Those are all paths to failure most of the time, versus the, how do I learn to navigate the thing that I'm given, It is what it is and I've got to deal with that, and hopefully do that in a positive way. And again, so the serendipity economy gives you both the opportunity to open up that mindset. And hopefully a framework for thinking about the ways that you could measure it, over time. and hopefully having, an agile thinking mindset alongside of that complements it.

Don Finley: 37:01

That's absolutely fantastic, Daniel. and I I feel like the expression that you're giving is We've got to be looking at that second order of what we're actually creating and how that contributes to our community, Like that wider community outside. But additionally, serendipity seems like something that we actually can control. or it's in our realm of control. and the aspect of thinking about how can I use this to touch more people? Or what are the activities that I can do to expand those opportunities? Because that is. Inside of our sphere of influence. yet at the same time, the results aren't as concrete as that straight out productivity gain. So I think this is really interesting and, I'm going to throw the challenge out there. I would love to see. how our audience is actually using this concept in their daily lives or in their business and how it flows because it is a nice transition to creating things that more people would find joy with. And so thank you for opening our eyes to, taking a second look at this or taking a different look at how we see our contribution to productivity, to the economy, and really where serendipity plays its part.

Daniel W Rasmus: 38:13

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a paper on the top of serious insights. net, called, welcome to the serendipity economy and some links in there to other work that I've done and happy to have a conversation there about it as well.

Don Finley: 38:26

Awesome. I absolutely love that. And what we'll do is we'll put a link in the show description for that as well. Daniel, once again, thank you so much for being on with us today.

Daniel W Rasmus: 38:36

Thank you. Appreciate the conversation as always.

Don Finley: 38:39

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