#changehappens
let's lose the surprise
“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.” — John Allen Paulos
“The only constant is change.” — Heraclitus
You’ve probably heard both of these. You may have lived them this week. And yet, even though we all know change is coming, most of us are still surprisingly unprepared to meet it — let alone take advantage of it.
Weird. Right?
So let’s talk about change and business. Specifically, how to see it coming, prepare for it, and use it as an accelerant. Practicing serendipitists — people who have developed the capacity to transform the unexpected into new value — don’t fear change. They court it. Change is the trigger, the springboard, the opening. It’s what makes leapfrogging possible.
A lot of smart people have thought hard about this, and lately I’ve been returning to three books that belong on every strategist and serendipitist’s shelf:
Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick — Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit
Most strategy work is built on the illusion of certainty. This book dismantles that. Bradley, Hirt, and Smit ask us to treat the future as a world of probabilities — to manage our decisions as an active, open risk portfolio rather than a fixed plan. What I find most useful is their insistence that sustained performance is required just to hold your current position — standing still is already falling behind. They identify three levers that shape any meaningful strategy: what you start with (endowment), the forces working in your favor or against you (trends), and what you actually do (moves). Their argument is that only “big moves” will matter: bold resource reallocation, meaningful M&A, real differentiation. Incremental adjustments don’t change trajectories. If you’re serious about strategy, this book will recalibrate your sense of what counts as action.
Seeing Around Corners — Rita McGrath
Rita McGrath’s book is a field guide for spotting inflection points before they arrive. Her argument is that weak signals are the things worth paying attention to — the peripheral, easy-to-dismiss data points that precede massive shifts. She offers concrete practices: get information from the street corner to the corner office, leverage genuine diversity of thought, distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions, foster small bets, and — critically — resist the very human tendency toward denial. Get out of the building. Talk to the future that is already unfolding. This is a book about staying awake.
Pattern Breakers — Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman
This is the one I recommend most often to people who feel stuck in optimization mode. Maples and Ziebelman make a compelling case that game-changing innovations don’t come from being a better version of what already exists — they come from escaping the comparison trap entirely. Their example sticks: when the iPhone launched, no one asked how it compared to a BlackBerry. When Tesla launched the Model S, no one benchmarked it against a Mercedes. These products didn’t compete; they forced a choice. The key, they argue, is finding a genuine insight — a non-obvious truth about how to harness an inflection to change human behavior in a radical way — and being willing to follow it somewhere genuinely new. Be a new banana, not a better apple.
What ties them together?
Each of these books starts from the same honest premise: the future is uncertain, and the ideas that will matter haven’t been fully formed yet. They each, in their own way, argue that you have to look for inflections, for signals, for new patterns, and that what you find must be turned into action.
This is the practice of serendipity made explicit. You seek out new inspiration, new experiences, and new inputs from unexpected places. You filter and collect the ones that resonate, even if you can’t yet say why. You connect them in new ways, letting them catalyze something that didn’t exist before. And then you pursue — not a single bet, but a portfolio of possibilities, letting some live and some die as you learn.
It sounds simple. And honestly, the concept is. The hard part is the conditions we work in: the inbox that never empties, the meetings that fill every opening, the timelines that demand execution precisely when what you need most is space for imagination. So ask yourself:
How are you creating the conditions for the unexpected to reach you?
How are you making sure you’ll recognize it when it does? (And what might become possible if you let it?)
Resources