Conferences Are Serendipity Machines

As you read this, I’m at Bouchercon in Calgary, being deliberately inefficient.

I have left my office, my carefully constructed systems, my task lists, my routines, and all the tools that let me find almost any piece of information I need without getting out of my chair.

Instead, I’m spending several days wandering around a hotel full of writers, readers, editors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and assorted people who think discussing fictional murder over breakfast is perfectly normal.

This is not an efficient way to work.

And that’s rather the point.

We’ve Gotten Very Good at Finding What We’re Looking For

One of the great advantages of being an indie author now is how much we can accomplish without leaving home.

Need to know something about Facebook advertising? Search for it. Need a cover designer? Search. Need historical information for a book? Search. Or ask other indies you know. Ask in an author group.

Need to figure out why your EPUB has suddenly developed a passionate hatred of Google Play? Search.

And now AI has made targeted research even faster. Instead of wading through twenty websites looking for one useful paragraph, we can often get pointed toward the answer almost immediately.

I’ve spent years building systems around exactly this principle. Reduce friction. Eliminate unnecessary steps. Automate what can be automated. Batch repetitive work. Keep information where I can find it again.

All good things.

But there’s a weakness built into all of them.

You have to know what you’re looking for.

Search is brilliant when you have a question. It is considerably less useful when you don’t yet know the question exists.

Enter the Chance Random Factor

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about serendipity and what I think of as “chance random factors.”

These are the things you didn’t plan for and couldn’t have planned for. You sit beside someone at lunch and discover she runs an event you’ve never heard of. You go to a panel because the one you intended to attend was full, and someone mentions a marketing technique you haven’t encountered before.

A reader tells you why she picked up one book from a display and ignored another. Someone introduces you to someone else.

You overhear a conversation. You notice that everyone seems to be talking about the same book. You see something another author is doing and think, Huh. Why aren’t I doing that?

Or, possibly even more valuable: Huh. Why is everyone doing that?

None of these things were on your task list. You couldn’t have searched for them because you didn’t know they existed. They are chance random factors.

And you don’t get nearly as many of them sitting alone in your office.

Efficiency Can Make Our Worlds Smaller

There’s an uncomfortable downside to becoming very good at controlling our working environment.

We remove randomness.

I choose which newsletters arrive in my inbox. Algorithms learn what I’m interested in. I follow people whose work is relevant to mine. I search for information connected to problems I already know I have.

Even my productivity systems are designed to keep me focused on what I’ve already decided matters.

This is extremely useful when I’m trying to get a book written.It’s less useful when I’m trying to discover what might matter next.

The more efficient our information systems become, the easier it is to travel along increasingly well-defined tracks.

And indie publishing right now is changing far too quickly for me to assume that everything interesting will conveniently appear on those tracks.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about serendipity in connection with what I’ve been calling the New Indie Author.

We’re entering a period when deliberately seeking out unfamiliar ideas, people, technologies, business models, markets, and possibilities may matter just as much as becoming more efficient at the things we already do.

Sometimes you need to get off the tracks.

Conferences Are Extremely Expensive Ways to Be Inefficient

Let’s not pretend otherwise. By the time you’ve paid registration, travel, accommodation, meals, and all the incidental costs that multiply mysteriously whenever you leave your own kitchen, attending a conference is a substantial investment.

Which makes “go to conferences because networking is important” spectacularly unhelpful advice. Of course networking is important. We know.

The more interesting question is what a conference gives you that you can’t get more cheaply and efficiently somewhere else. For an experienced indie author, I’m increasingly convinced that the answer isn’t primarily information. Most information is easy to get now.

It’s exposure to things you weren’t looking for.

A conference compresses hundreds or thousands of people from overlapping parts of an industry into the same physical space. Then it shakes the box. For several days, you repeatedly encounter people and ideas you would never have deliberately searched for.

That’s a serendipity machine.

This Changes How I Think About “Networking”

I am an introvert. This may be the least surprising statement ever published on this blog.

I’ve never found the standard advice to “work the room” particularly useful. Apart from sounding faintly horrifying, it makes networking feel like a numbers game in which I’m supposed to accumulate as many Important Professional Contacts as possible before fleeing back to my hotel room.

But if the objective is serendipity, I don’t have to work the room. I have to be available for collisions. Sit with someone I don’t know. Ask someone what they’re working on. Talk to the person beside me while we’re waiting for a panel.

Go look at the displays. Attend something outside my normal area of interest. Listen when readers talk about books.

Ask questions.

And perhaps most importantly, don’t schedule every minute so tightly that there’s no room left for anything unexpected to happen.

That’s a very different kind of networking. And for me, a much more appealing one.

You Can Design for Serendipity

“Serendipity” sounds passive. You get lucky. Something happens to you. You stumble across the right person at exactly the right moment.

But you can increase the number of opportunities you give luck to work with. You can go somewhere unfamiliar. Talk to someone outside your normal circle. Read outside your genre. Attend the oddball panel. Take a different route through the book room.

Say yes to lunch. Ask one more question. Leave some blank space in the schedule.

None of that guarantees anything useful will happen. That’s rather inherent in the word serendipity. Most chance encounters will probably produce nothing more consequential than a pleasant conversation.

But occasionally one changes what you do next. And that’s the part we can’t optimize in advance.

The Productive Value of Inefficiency

I am still very much in favour of systems. I am not coming home from Bouchercon and deleting my task manager in a fit of anti-productivity zeal.

Efficiency buys us time. Systems preserve our attention. Automation removes work that doesn’t need our brains.

But perhaps one of the things we should occasionally do with the time all that efficiency gives us is spend some of it inefficiently. Not scrolling randomly through social media and calling it research, but putting ourselves somewhere that exposes us to people, ideas, industries, conversations, and possibilities outside the carefully curated stream we normally inhabit.

A conference is one way to do that. There are certainly cheaper ones.

But while you’re reading this, I’m wandering around Bouchercon, talking to people I didn’t know yesterday, hearing things I didn’t know I needed to hear, and quite possibly attending something that wasn’t on my original schedule.

I don’t know what I’ll get out of it. For once, that’s the point.

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