Serendipity is the occurrence of the unplanned.Engineering is the occurrence of the planned.
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When we experience serendipity our heart rate picks up and our brain fills with dopamine. It’s intoxicating. We proclaim “WHAT ARE THE ODDS?!” As community builders, our job is to increase those odds.
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For serendipity to occur, there must be an 🧵 “unexpected thread” throughout the experience. The more unexpected each step feels, the more it will be perceived as serendipity.
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We can sum these criteria up into three actionable categories:🧠 Internal Context: How you prime your members. You want them to be high-energy, comfortable, not busy, and willing to socialize.🏠 External Context: The space and format you use to bring them together. Ideally, they are unfamiliar, free of distraction, and create opportunities to meet a variety of people in a variety of contexts.🤝 Social Context: The people you surround them with. You want people who are unfamiliar, but who have similar interests, knowledge, and personalities.
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Immersion means bringing members together, for an extended period of time, in a space that is free of distraction and allows them to have repeated social collisions. One way to immerse your members is with multi-day, in-person events.
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- [note::Multi-day, in-person events = Serendipity machines]

*Take care of your introverts by offering highly facilitated/guided experiences, and creating quiet spaces to escape (we had an “introvert zone” at CMX Summit where you weren’t allowed to talk, Evan Hamilton’s genius idea).
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The goal is to connect your members with:a variety of unfamiliar peoplea variety of unfamiliar experiencesa variety of familiar topics
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You can introduce members personally. That’s great. Or to automate introductions, you can use a tool like Donut, Meetsy, or Orbiit to match members up using AI.
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at CMX Summit, we’d host “Birds of Feather” tables where each table had a discussion topic and facilitator, so attendees could meet other people interested in the same subtopic while they ate.
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I’ve been to events where instead of having attendees write just their name on their name tag, they have them write a hobby they love, a skill they have, a book they’re reading... a variety of topics to connect around.
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- social connection, event planning,

People aren’t always good at people’ing. They need permission. They need guidance.Help them find triggers. Push them to them to follow up. They need you to facilitate.
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in the Trends.vc community, Dru Riley hosts daily standups where members share what they did yesterday, what they will do today, and how other members can help.
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To incentivize members to participate in daily standups, Dru offers access to more community resources if they maintain a daily streak:
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