Serendipity at work is an idea that random unscheduled encounters of co-workers will help people get new perspectives, and in aggregate will improve the speed and quality of work. Pre-Covid, it was accomplished through physical containment - put people in the same office and have them walk the same hallways or stairs on their way to a meeting or to get coffee.
In May 2020 (during the height of Covid lockdowns), I suggested that “serendipity in fully remote workplaces will be driven by technology; this tech has not been invented yet”.
I think this tech is finally here. As everybody’s work now includes AI assistants, a company could aggregate all prompts and responses in near real-time. Cross-check them against each other using LLMs, and “generate” serendipity.
Imagine these messages from Serena, a hypothetical enterprise serendipity generation Slack bot:
Hey Bob and Alice, it looks like both of you are working on solving a similar problem such and such. Would you like to chat to each other about it?
Hey Bob, it looks like you are looking for sales numbers from 15 years ago which seem to be gone. Strangely, Alice had the same problem last week. Want me to connect you two?
Hey Bob, it looks like you are trying to figure out how to use this new open source library in your project. Alice tried yesterday as well but in the end it didn’t work and she used library X. Does this ring a bell?