I also love to attend the TLT Symposium, and one of the biggest reasons is that they always bring in a heavy hitter to start the day. This year, they brought in Frans Johansson, who along with being a dynamic speaker is the author of two books, The Medici Effect and The Click Moment. Often, I go to events like this where I find myself just going along with the speaker without being challenged or inspired. I found myself being both challenged and inspired by Frans, both by his approach to public speaking and to the way that he engages, challenges, and inspires.

I hear so many who have had success in any field talk about their approach. I get the feeling that they feel that what they have learned and what they are doing is somehow superior to what others do. They have the formula to success and everyone else should just line up to drink from their elixir. Frans doesn’t take that approach. He talks about the role of luck in success. That is refreshing! How can success all be so easy to figure and calculate? It can’t. Some who have success are more lucky than skilled. Here are a series of quotes and tweets from the session that highlight this idea,

• Tweet from @JustStormy (Melissa Hicks) "Frankly, I [Frans Johansson] got lucky [refering to success with his book, The Medici Effect]." Isn’t that how it mostly works? Serendipitous meetings, sudden moments…"
• Tweet from @stevier (Stevie Rocco) You don’t have to know the field better than anyone else to get it right. Randomness and serendipity make us stand apart.

Of course, success in all fields isn’t necessarily random as Johansson points out using Serena Williams and tennis. If a field has strict parameters, then it is best to use a strategy of repetition and hardworking with the aim of doing things better than others through sheer will. But in a field like technology, art, entertainment, education, and most businesses, the rules change all the time and the audience may make unexpected decisions about what they think is best. For these situations, decisions about what to do will be difficult since it is nearly impossible to determine what will work.

So what do we do? What is the role of strategy in the first place? Should we just act randomly and hope for the best? First, it’s difficult for humans to act randomly. This was illustrated by playing rock-paper-scissors with our neighbor. Truth be told, I lost 3-2 to Melissa. The best strategy in this game is to be able to act randomly. I’m terrible at being random as most humans are. We see this all the time with teenagers who in their quest to be different, create a culture of sameness. I get a bit tenative just thinking about this. Strategies can help to at least start of the process of acting. If you need a strategy to act, then do it.

But how do we ensure that our strategies will provide novel ideas that have a better chance of being winning strategies? This has a better chance of success by putting together diverse groups. Anecdotally, I have seen this myself in my work as an ID. In situations where those with different skills sets and perspectives are placed together in teams, they will accomplish more. That doesn’t mean the environment is always fun or without conflict. But the outcome of having to work with others is tremendous.

I liked how Frans likened ideas as bets. Many times, our ideas are large and involve much investment to start. His suggestion was to place many small bets in order to maximize success. This strategy is what Google employs. Accepting that many ideas will be failures but failing faster and smaller will allow for that one great idea to come to the surface. Here is a great tweet by Melissa repeating Frans comment on Picasso

• Place many bets. "Picasso painted over 50,000 paintings…most of those sat in basements! Why? They SUCKED!" – Frans Johansson

Employing this strategy of failing smaller and often means that one has to be resilient. It seems to me that many are hamstrung by the thought of failure. It can lead to paralysis. Unfortuantely, I can see this as a problem here at the university. Many are happy to continue on as is. I think this is a result of the success that the univeristy has had. Success can lead to a lean toward being conservative and relying on past successes. I’m not sure what needs to happen to change this. I’m afraid that larger organizational failure may be that thing.

Frans ended the session by telling us to pay attention to surprise. To me, this is a fresh way of thinking and that freshness is the way that we can move ahead. Imagine if Penn State worked on the premise of a barrage of small ideas that may fail. Just by shear size, we could start a revolution in education.