Walking back into the Atrium of Serendipity

Article #6

“15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.” Noah Smith

The Oracle

In the early spring of 2009, I was maybe five months into my new job as a ‘commercial specialist’ in the commercial department in EirGrid – the company in Ireland responsible for keeping the lights on.

My job was basically to take a load of reports from various engineering departments and put them together in one big report. And then a contract was issued to a wind farm or an industrial plant based on that big report.

At its core, EirGrid was and is an engineering company. Maybe someday I’ll go full method and play an engineer in some flick buried in the Netflix black hole, but in real life, I know as much about electricity pylons as I do about fifth-century Roman ceramics.

Anyway, I would get all these reports on 110KV this and step down transformer that. Those reports prompted a lot of questions – some more basic than others.

So, I would sit at my desk and email people looking for answers. And the closer my big report deadline loomed, the more emails I sent. Then it became a combination of ringing people’s desk phones and more frequent, more panicked emails.

I know now my self-diagnosed deadline anxiety was of little concern to my new-found work colleagues. They had bigger cables to fry.

One particular afternoon, in the throws of said anxiety, the guy sitting behind me suggested I go “talk to Feeley.”

Reluctantly, I lifted myself from my comfortable chair and made a beeline for the Transmission Access Management (TAM) team. I knew shag all about shag all at that stage, but I knew enough to know those TAM bucks were a law unto themselves.

I made my way across the building. Comfort zone in the rear-view.

And there he was, cocooned in a zen like state of concentration. Feeley - the Oracle. And soon to be the quick fix saviour of my troubled soul.

Me: Ah, Enda, sorry to bother you.

Feeley: …

Me: [beat] Enda, have you got a second?

Feeley: …

Surrounding keyboard tapping drops down a noticeable notch or two. I sense there’s an audience, who’ve seen this scene before – but are keen for a re-run.

Feeley swivels around. Looks me dead in the eye.

Me: Howya, yeah sorry, did you see my emails?

Feeley: I get a lot of emails.

Me: Right…well…ah

At this stage, if felt like people were literally taking out popcorn from under their desks.

Me: Right…well…I need those answers there before tomorrow.

Feeley: Are they the right questions though?

Me: …Sorry?

And with that Feeley swivelled and got back to work. I was livid and mortified all at once. After what felt like an eternity stranded in no man’s land, I began my walk of shame, watching as one by one, smiling eyes darted above the top of computer screens, before darting back again.

The Atrium

In 1985, after Steve Jobs was invited to leave Apple, he set up a digital animation company called Pixar. As well as profits, Jobs wanted to maximise random encounters. Pixar had a mix of designers and animators working alongside computer scientists – very different tribes of people.

When he bought a factory in North Oakland, California, architects presented a design for three separate buildings: one for animators, one for computer scientists and one for the executive management team. Jobs tore it up. He insisted on one building, with a glass atrium smack bang in the middle.

He didn’t stop there. He made sure the atrium was home to the mailboxes, the meeting rooms, the cafeteria, the coffee shop, the gift shop, you name it. He even wanted the only toilets in the company to be located there – but someone managed to talk him around on that one.

There is one thing he wanted to foster at all costs: random encounters. Those water cooler moments that spark ideas, conversations, but most of all human connections.

I’ve had a couple of water cooler moments myself recently that have stayed with me.

The first was with a young kid at my gym - let’s call him Arnold. He’s twenty-four and Generation Z (born between 1995-2000). He’s in the kind of shape all the vanilla whey protein and dumbbells in China wouldn’t get me within a donkey’s roar of.

Anyway, he’s three or four years out of university and working in tech. And he’s never worked full-time in an office. All he’s ever known is working from home.

He’s a shy kid so the gym is his outlet, his real-life social network.

The other was standing in a coffee line chatting to a woman who knew working life both before and after Covid-19. She’s Generation Y, or a much-maligned millennial (born between 1980-94). Let’s call her Meghan.

For Meghan, the post Covid-19 working-from-home working world has changed dramatically. She has noticed that it can be difficult to get to the rub of any day-to-day project issues. Bumps take longer to smooth out remotely, as walking over to someone’s desk is no longer an option. Even when her co-workers are in the office, they revert to eating lunch at their desk, headphones in, head down.

A Fragmenting

They say when astronauts see the Earth from space for the first time, they immediately view our home anew. No borders, vast sea and land and a sense of a kind of global consciousness.

Or as Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon, succinctly put it: “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch'.”

If it feels like the world is fragmenting, it’s probably because it is. In a way, the Utopian ideal of a global consciousness, all of us marching toward the horizon together, is an idea we cling to as a race of people stranded on a billion-year-old rock spinning through space-time.

The global consciousness experiment that has grabbed the world by the scruff of its collective collar is the Internet. And no more so than those virtual digital atriums that are Twitter and Facebook. However, it feels like those platforms have reached the end of a prolonged launch phase.

As Noah Smith outlines: “The hatred and toxicity of Twitter at times felt like the dying screams of human individuality, being crushed to death by the hive mind’s constant demands for us to agree with more people than we ever evolved to agree with. But human individuality would not die. Instead it is centralized social media that is dying.”

Rumours of Twitter’s demise may, or may not, be greatly exaggerated, but it does seem that it’s no longer the centralised digital atrium where we all gather to see what’s happening and whose turn it is to get digitally fleeced.

Even before Elon waltzed in on his electric horse, the fraction of U.S. teens on Twitter had nosedived from 33% to 23%.

Facebook isn’t exactly in rocket mode either. Recent research highlighted that roughly one in five U.S. teens are almost constantly on YouTube and almost 70% spend zero time on Facebook.

Source: Pew Research Centre, April 2022

Steve Jobs’ vision of a real-life shining atrium where artists and geeks find common ground is disappearing. Maybe for no other good reason than the fact that real estate and lease arrangement overhead really effect the bottom line. HSBC certainly thought so when they pulled out of Canary Wharf recently.

Tik Tok Tik Tok

And so be it. Adapt or die.

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know too many who would get watery eyed at the waning of Fakebook or Twitter as our virtual atriums. No matter what they re-brand themselves as.

Yet, never mind centralised social media, centralised anything is dying. We might share a platform, but everyone’s 9 o’clock news feed looks different now. The long established real-world and digital atriums are going, going, soon to be gone for good.

Not that any of that will bother the Tik Tokers.

The TikTok generation face a very tailored set of challenges and it’s staring them straight in the face, all day every day.

As outlined by Gurwinder: “It would seem, then, that the rapid liberalization and medicalization of young people, enabled by social media, has hindered their self-belief and resilience to setbacks. Many teenagers have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, pathologize it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologization and distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in [mental health] diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalization; society is teaching kids to feel powerless and worthless, which is causing real dysfunctions.”

Take my gym buddy, Arnold. He’s going to have a social anxiety of some sort - who doesn’t at twenty-three - but how will he evolve? And by that I mean fuck up at work, learn how to deal with actual confrontation, learn from a good line manager and learn from a bad line manager. That kind of messy evolution is going to be tricky if he’s sitting in his apartment on his own, headphones on and siloed most of the time.

Go into any coffee shop, stand in any queue, sit on any train and people are heads down, phones out. That’s not going to change, I get it.

Invoking the Random

But, how do we invoke random encounters in this uber hybrid and siloed world?

A fancier word for random encounter is serendipity. The Oxford dictionary defines serendipity as: ‘The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.’

Dr Christian Busch, in his book The Serendipity Mindset, describes it another way: “Serendipity is the hidden force in the world, and it is present all around us, from the smallest day-to-day events to life-changing, and sometimes world-changing, breakthroughs.”

I always thought serendipity was blind luck, or a magic-like potion that favoured the good and the great. Like when a fresh-faced Isaac Newton was sat under that tree when the apple fell. Destiny calling, in Newton’s case, in the shape of a shiny Granny Smith.

Movies show us the big moment, that flashpoint when everything changes for our hero. They’re down and out and all of a sudden they get discovered. Fate, destiny, the Gods, or Gandalf intervene at the eleventh hour to sprinkle some magic dust on our hero and off they go.

Maybe there’s more to it though. As Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favours the prepared mind only.”

Supersonic

Mancunian rock heroes, Oasis, were famously discovered at Edinburgh’s legendary King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in 1993, by Alan McGee, the then founder of an indie label called Creation.

As legend has it, Oasis were not on the bill that night, but arrived at the door and threatened to thrash the joint if they weren’t allowed to play. McGee happened to be there and after their set, walked straight up to songwriter and guitarist Noel Gallagher and offered them a record deal. Just like that.

Now, no-one has been more central to the spread of that myth than Noel himself.

But the reality was a little different.

On a non-eventful May Monday in 1993, Oasis asked fellow Manchester band Sister Lovers for a lift up to Glasgow. The all-girl outfit had a slot booked at King Tut’s, supporting Glasgow bands Boyfriend and 18 Wheeler, who were both signed to McGee’s Creation Records.

For Oasis, at that point, the trip was a total punt. They’d been knocking around the rehearsal rooms at the Boardwalk in Manchester for almost three years at this stage, with barely anyone taking notice. Not a single column inch had been dedicated to them up to that point.

But Noel Gallagher smelled something else.

Prior to joining Oasis, he had spent two years touring the world as a roadie for Manchester indie band, The Inspiral Carpets. He learned many things on the road. One of which was how to put yourself in the way of people who can move you up the ladder.

Alan McGee was someone who could move them up the ladder.

That fateful Monday, McGee was in the middle of a bitter romantic breakup. His sister, Susan, coaxed him into coming down to King Tut’s, as she was meeting a pal was also recently single and ready to begin to mingle.

McGee reluctantly relented and headed down to meet his sister and her mate for a wee drink.

On that night, Oasis didn’t threaten to trash the joint if they weren’t allowed on stage. They negotiated a quick four songs at no additional cost to the venue, save for a few beers. Win-win for everyone.

And the rest is Rock ‘n’ Roll history.

Except McGee didn’t offer Oasis a signed deal there and then at King Tut’s, owing mainly to his intake of JD and coke and whatever else you’re havin’. He did invite the lads to the Creation office in London to talk turkey. They got the train down, got lamped on some cans and high on the prospect of rock stardom.

Noel stayed sober enough to do the talking. And assured McGee he had more songs in his back pocket than you could shake a stick at (he did) and that he loved the music of all of the artists McGee had on the office wall (he didn’t).

Right place, right time, right?

The prepared mind of Gallagher and company had positioned themselves for serendipity and maxed the bejaysus out of it.

We may never have heard Wonderwall if Liam and Noel had stayed sat in their mam’s kitchen in Burnage and McGee hadn’t taken Susan up on that drink.

Expect the Unexpected

We’re all guilty of the narrative fallacy. The succinct story that airbrushes out the random bits and underlines more of the purpose and planning employed to lead us to glory – the bits that make us look like the chosen ones or the masters of our own cosmic destiny. Especially when it comes to our careers.

I don’t know about you, but the most significant events that have taken place in my life, and the most influential people I’ve met, happened through little or no design of my own. But it’s always easier to join the dots afterwards.

But what if we didn’t wait until afterword? What if we did a little more dot joining today, expanded our field of vision to lean into the random and unexpected.

Because the unexpected is everywhere and it’s the norm, not the outlier.

Take a group of five British researchers who were looking to cure the heart condition called angina. They couldn’t understand how their trial drug consistently had one big side effect on men – a whopper of an erection. Every time baby.

Now, most British researchers would do the British thing: retreat with bittersweet politeness and carry on. Not these bucks. Oh no, they rose to the occasion and eventually developed a blue pill called Viagra.

They knew a couple of random dots when they saw them.

And if scientific research teaches non-scientific schmucks like me and you anything, it’s that trying things can have random outcomes. And those random outcomes can be gold.

Every new interaction with a person or idea, broadens our opportunity space into people, places, and things it might have been all too easy to dismiss before.

One for the Road

It’s well into the wee small hours of a Friday morning in December of 2013 and I’m standing at the back bar downstairs in Whelan’s, Dublin’s very own version of King Tut’s.

And no more than McGee in ‘93, I’m a little worse for wear.

But I’m not alone.

Me: One for the road, Enda?

Feeley: …

The curtain is about to come down, not only on a long day bleeding into night, but on my time in EirGrid. Notice handed in weeks ago, I’m off to London in January to explore a gnawing feeling I could dismiss no longer.

Me: [To the barman] We’ve time for two more, chief, surely?

Feeley: At least you ask better questions now than you did five years ago!

We laugh.

Sláinte. Down the hatch.

We embrace.

Feeley smiles, winks, says “The very best of luck to ya. Mind yourself.”

And like that, he swivelled once more, out the door and into the black of the night.

When I learned of his death three years later, the wind was taken out of my blades.

Feeley, the Oracle?

Say it ain’t so. Say it ain’t so.

All that still potent, boyish charm, that razor-sharp intellect, the golf swing to die for, scattered to the winds of that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller has ever returned.

There are days I still think of him.

And especially when I think of a question I’ve only half thought about. I think “Enda would ask a better question here”.

I was never so grateful for the random and reluctant act of getting up out of my chair and walking into the atrium.