Frans Johansson (author of The Medici Effect) has written a book, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World, with two provocative ideas. The first thought is that success is random. The second is that individuals and corporations can do more to shape their success by identifying and focusing on the opportunities as they occur.
In Part 1 of the book, Johansson presents a number of real world examples of the random nature of success. He disputes that there are formulaic patterns for success and only allows for high chances of success for a profession where the rules don’t change such as tennis (court size remains the same), chess, and mastery of a musical instrument. He cites examples of Serena Williams (tennis), Laslo Polgar and his three grandmaster daughters (chess), and Yo Yo Ma (cello) of individuals who practiced longer and harder than others and because of that dedication and the fact that the rules of the game or the instrument didn’t change, their dedication paid off.
Johansson presents Nokia as an example of an impacted company noting that it was the world’s leader in cell phones in 2006 but fell from its leadership position by failing to recognize the importance of smartphones initially introduced by Apple and later followed by Google, Samsung, and others. The iPhone changed the rules in the mobile phone market and Nokia failed to recognize the importance of that change. Johansson states that if the rules can change at any time, then it is extremely difficult to predict the strategies for success in that industry. If the experts at an industry leader like Nokia couldn’t predict that the industry’s next logical move would be smartphones, how can anyone really expect to predict the next big product?
Seizing Opportunity is the title of Part 2. Click moments are random events that lead to the opportunity for success. Johansson writes about a Microsoft cocktail party in which two employees with physics PhD’s, Dave Weise and Murray Sargent, happened to run into each other. Sargent chided Weise about the memory issues that Microsoft was having with Windows, issues so severe that Microsoft was betting that OS/2 would take the place of Windows as its primary operating system software. Sargent made a suggestion to Weise about changing the way that Windows operated with the PC memory processor and Weise suggested that the two of them go to his office immediately to see if the idea would work. The rest is history. However, if Sargent and Weise had not run into each other at the party by chance (they did not work in the same divisions of Microsoft), the Windows memory problem may not have been fixed in time for it to become the dominant operating software shaping the PC industry. This random event is called The Click Moment.
Johansson claims that click moments “tend to occur when two separate concepts, ideas, or people meet.” They are also impossible to predict. Lastly, click moments generally elicit an emotional response such as excitement. Those responses create a desire by the individuals experiencing it to take the idea to the next level. To increase your chances of achieving great success, Johansson believes that you need to increase the number of click moments in your life. He proposes four ways to increase click moments. These four ways are: (1) Take your eyes off the ball which is defined as taking time to explore ideas that are not related to your immediate goal, (2) Use intersectional thinking which is defined as finding a connection between unlike ideas, (3) Follow your curiosity because “curiosity is the way your intuition tells you that something interesting is going on”, and (4) Reject the predictable path which allows another set of opportunities to be presented that your competition may not be considering.
Purposeful bets are the actions that achievers take after a click moment occurs. Murray Sargent and David Weise of Microsoft immediately took the time to test their theory after their click moment occurred, for example. Actions like this involve risk, sometimes big risks and sometimes small risks. Without investing time, money, reputation, or energy or some combination of all four, it is not possible to determine if the click moment is actionable. Those investments are purposeful bets. Johansson suggests how to place purposeful bets and suggests five different tactics. These tactics are: (1) place many bets, (2) minimize the size of the bets, (3) take the smallest executable step, (4) calculate affordable loss, not ROI, and (5) use passion as a fuel.
Johansson completes his book by discussing the three types of complex forces and how to harness them in order to improve your chances at dealing with the randomness of life and business. His suggested tactics are: (1) create large hooks for the forces to latch on to, (2) take a closer look at surprises and see them as opportunities, (3) look for an opening or a pathway to breakthrough success, (4) spot momentum and intensity which isn’t always as easy as it sounds, and (5) double down on your purposeful bets if you find something that works.
I like Johansson’s book and think that his insights will be very helpful to many. At the same time, there’s a broader concept at play here. In order for someone to take advantage of Johansson’s recommended tactics and insights, I think it’s important for individuals to be critical thinkers. Critical thinking can be learned through years of experience or it can be taught. Many colleges and universities talk about a learning outcome goal to teach critical thinking but few can document their success. Graduating students who can recognize click moments will demonstrate an institution’s success as well as provide students and prospective students with a glimpse of the potential return on investment of a college education.
