Glossary of Serendipity Terms
The serendipity research has its own vocabulary. I thought it was worth collecting those that stabilised so far in a glossary.
This is the seventh post in the serendipity series.
The glossary is structured like this. There are three bullets under each term. The first bullet is a definition, the second is about its origin, and the third is an example.
Bisociation
Association of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought.
Coined by Arthur Koestler to describe the functional basis of creative thinking.
Bernard Sadow bisociated the observation of an airport worker rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled skid with his own struggle of dragging heavy bags, leading to the invention of the rolling suitcase.
Epistemic Expectations
Internalised beliefs or community norms about where knowledge comes from, what kinds of discoveries are possible, and what results are likely to be produced by a specific method.
Introduced in the field of serendipity research by Samantha Copeland.
Lewis Thomas and Aaron Kellner both observed rabbit ears drooping after injections of the enzyme papain. Initially, they both ignored this anomaly due to their epistemic expectations of the scientific community regarding cartilage as inert and relatively uninteresting.
Generative Doubt
A motivated search for understanding, stimulated by the experience of not knowing.
A management concept, introduced by Cunha et al. in 2015, emphasizing doubt as a creative force.
Honda achieved success in the US market by not clinging to their original plan for large bikes and by responding to the unexpected popularity of their small delivery bikes.
Indwelling
A technique for cultivating an “art of locality” by immersing oneself deeply in a specific context or material environment.
Emphasized as a method for internalizing situational knowledge and cultivating metis by W. D. Holford (2020), linked to James Scott’s (1998) descriptions of the “art of locality” and “traditional cultivators” who develop complex techniques by dwelling within their specific environmental contingencies. It was formally applied to serendipity studies by Synne Frydenberg et al. (2019) in the context of design-driven field studies. The concept draws on Michael Polanyi’s work regarding the internalization of tacit knowledge.
Designers of arctic ship bridges stayed on a boat in harsh conditions to indwell with the crew, leading to “contextual wake-up calls” and unplanned improvements in their designs.
Managed Serendipity
An organisational strategy that utilises narrative methods to enable multiple and unexpected encounters with original anecdotal material. It prioritises natural learning processes and the synthesis of diverse stories over the rigid imposition of best practice, aiming to increase the probability of discovering emergent solutions rather than simply repeating past actions.
Coined by David Snowden in 2003, arguing that while best practice is useful for ordered systems, innovation in complex systems depends on the disruption of entrenched patterns of thinking.
A company implements a narrative database of uninterpreted stories from its staff, including retiring employees who share anecdotal wisdom. Instead of using directed keyword searches, a user runs abstract queries. This forces multiple encounters with original material that would otherwise be filtered out.
Metis
“Cunning wisdom”; a form of responsive reasoning that allows individuals to respond well to changing circumstances, ambiguity, and the unexpected.
Named after the Greek goddess Metis, the first wife of Zeus, who embodied shape-shifting and clever intelligence.
Captain “Sully” Sullenberger’s emergency landing of an Airbus on the Hudson River in 2009.
Microserendipity
Small-scale discovery occurring during mundane practice where an unintended observation triggers a break in one’s flow state, acting as a pivot event that forces an immediate reassessment of the agent’s creative intent or trajectory.
Primarily developed and refined by Wendy Ross and Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau to move serendipity research toward a granular, systematic analysis of creative action as it unfolds. Earlier iterations of the concept were explored by Beghetto (2013) in the context of classroom creativity and by Bogers and Björneborn (2013) to describe coincidences shared on digital platforms such as Twitter.
Researcher Ana Piñeyro experienced microserendipity when she overloaded a polymeric coil, creating a “mistake” that she noticed had unique aesthetic and heat-responsive qualities, pivoting her research.
Pseudo-serendipity
Discoveries that occur by accident and sagacity, but where the investigator was already actively in quest of that specific finding.
Coined by Royston Roberts (1989) to distinguish between pure serendipity and accidental solutions to known problems.
Charles Goodyear spent a decade searching for a way to stabilize rubber; he accidentally dropped a mixture on a hot stove, discovering vulcanization, a solution he sought, but found through an unplanned event.
Retrospective Coronation
The process of using hindsight to label a past accident as serendipitous only after a valuable outcome has been achieved and validated by personal or social judgment.
Formally introduced by philosopher Samantha Copeland to describe how the status of a discovery is not inherent in the moment of the accident but is bestowed post-factum by the scientific community.
Penicillin was only “coronated” as a serendipitous discovery years after the initial observation; at the time of the accident, Fleming simply found the mold funny rather than recognizing it as a legendary breakthrough.
Sagacity
Perceptive wisdom or the ability to sniff out value in accidental results that others might dismiss as errors or noise.
From the Latin sagax (of quick perception, acute).
Alexander Fleming’s sagacity lay in his complex recognition that a contaminant mold was actively killing bacteria, rather than simply viewing it as a ruined culture to be discarded.
Serendipity
Making discoveries by accident and sagacity of things which one is not in quest of.
Coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, inspired by the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip.
Christopher Columbus, setting out for the Indies but stumbling upon the Americas, is considered a spectacular historical instance of the phenomenon.
Serendipity Filters
Internal or external pressures — such as preconceived notions, time constraints, or rigid goals — that cause a person to ignore a potentially valuable accidental connection.
Coined by Abigail McBirnie to characterize the situational pressures that cause potential discoveries to be lost and to explain the paradox of control in serendipitous processes.
Aaron Kellner observed the same floppy ears in rabbits as Lewis Thomas, but used the phenomenon only as a strength test, failing to follow up because of his narrow focus on cardiovascular muscle.
Strong Emergence
A phenomenon is strongly emergent if it cannot be deduced, even in principle, from the properties of the underlying components or the process from which it originates.
A technical term in philosophy and complexity sciences coined by David Chalmers.
The discovery of smallpox vaccination was a distributed process that emerged from folk knowledge, repeated witnessings by farmers, and the patronage of the scientific community.
Thinging
The conceptualisation of thinking as an active, distributed engagement with material objects, where things are not viewed as passive or immutable but as forcefields of continuous, active transition that participate in human cognitive life.
Originally coined by Martin Heidegger to denote the active nature of objects. It was later adapted and expanded by Lambros Malafouris as a core component of Material Engagement Theory (MET).
In pottery-making, the potter does not simply externalize a preconceived mental blueprint onto inert matter. Instead, as the hand and eye touch the clay, the specific form of a line or curve is learned into existence through a spontaneous dialogue with the material’s resistance.
That’s it for now. There are also terms such as bahramdipity, super-encounterers and zemblanity, but they are not used frequently enough to make it to this glossary.
References
Barber, B., & Fox, R. C. (1958). The Case of the Floppy-Eared Rabbits: An Instance of Serendipity Gained and Serendipity Lost. American Journal of Sociology, 64(2), 128–136.
Chalmers, D. J. (2008). Strong and Weak Emergence. In P. Clayton & P. Davies (Eds.), The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (p. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199544318.003.0011
Copeland, S. (2019). On serendipity in science: Discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom. Synthese, 196(6), 2385–2406.
Cunha, M. P. e, Rego, A., Clegg, S., & Lindsay, G. (2015). The dialectics of serendipity. European Management Journal, 33(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.11.001
“Fleming Leapt on the Unusual like a Weasel on a Vole”: Challenging the Paradigms of Discovery in Science | Request PDF. (n.d.). ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00294
Koestler, A. (1964). The Act of Creation. One 70 Press. (Original work published 1964)
Malafouris, L. (2020). Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(1), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419873349
Martin Heidegger, M. (n.d.). Being and Time. Retrieved March 24, 2026, from https://sunypress.edu/Books/B/Being-and-Time2 (Original work published 1927)
McBirnie, A. (2008). Seeking serendipity: The paradox of control. Aslib Proceedings, 60(6), 600–618. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012530810924294
Roberts, R. M. M. (1989). Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science. Wiley.
Snowden, D. (2003). Managing for Serendipity or why we should lay off “best practice” in KM. International Journal of Knowledge Management - IJKM, 6.