Questions for you:
- What deliberate practices do I have for exposing myself to unexpected inputs, ideas, or perspectives?
- Am I spending too much time in familiar spaces, consuming familiar content, following familiar routines?
- How might I actively cultivate conditions where useful accidents are more likely to occur?
Questions for your organisation:
- Do our physical and digital workspaces facilitate unexpected encounters and cross-pollination of ideas?
- Are we allowing people enough unstructured time and space to notice and pursue serendipitous discoveries?
- What mechanisms do we have to capture and share the valuable accidents that occur across different teams?
Further reading
David Bowie talking about the cut up technique and describing it as a “Western tarot”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1InCrzGIPU
A biography of Vivian Maier: https://www.vivianmaier.com/about-vivian-maier/
William Burroughs talking about his cut-up method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTHU5Jal25g
Interactive Exhibit
Do your own cut ups! Paste some text and you can cut up any prose you like!
https://experiments.randomthebook.com/cutup/
About the image
I took some words from Rick Rubin’s book about creativity, The Creative Act and then cut them up.
Image Matt Ballantine 2026
Random the Book 
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