Excessive order stifles the opportunities for serendipity
You can build a wonderful portal with the best taxonomy in the world but people will still use people to connect with knowledge. I often ask a simple question at conferences: faced with a difficult or intractable problem, would you use a best practice or find a group of people with relevant experience and listen to their stories? Inevitably people go for the stories not the database. Of course those stories are not full formed; they are anecdotes, often no more than a paragraph long if transcribed…
In effect the natural human approach to knowledge harvesting, distribution and creation is to manage for serendipity, placing oneself in a position where one can encounter happy accidents and thereby synthesize new meaning and understanding. Excessive order stifles the opportunities for serendipity and we resist it. The shadow or informal networks of an organisation are more powerful than its formal processes…Narrative is a key aspect of serendipity in human systems, we pay more attention to stories, and metaphor can allow us to assimilate an unfamiliar concept
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Introducing a degree of inefficiency so that the system as a whole has the potential to evolve
Social software doesn’t enable serendipity; it transforms serendipity into probability
