Giving Chance a Chance

I. What chance is and what it is not

In everyday speech, chance has a firmer standing than it deserves. We speak of it as though it were an agent — it brings something about, it wants something, it sends someone our way. This personification is comforting. It relieves us of the burden of explanation when something unexpected happens, and it relieves us of the burden of responsibility when the unexpected is left unused.

It is also wrong. Chance brings about nothing. The word names a very sober fact: that every day, in every hour, a large number of encounters, messages, readings, and perceptions are possible, that most of them remain without consequence, and that single ones — unpredictable in particular, statistically probable in aggregate — set in motion something that could not have been seen beforehand. What we call chance is not the event itself. It is the fact that the event was not planned.

From this follows a shift that must stand at the beginning of any serious reflection on the relation between plan and possibility. Chance offers something. What happens to the offer depends not on chance but on the one who receives it. Most offers are not taken up — because no one looked at the right moment, or because the one who looked had other things to do, or because the structures in which that person stands do not provide for taking up an unplanned possibility. Chance is not scarce. The attention that recognises it is.

II. The second in which something happens, or does not

Whoever observes the process closely sees that it is a very small moment. An email arrives from an unknown sender. A link is dropped in passing during a conversation. A patent is grazed by chance in a search. A question is asked that does not belong to the day's agenda. A person speaks of something that moves alongside the actual topic. In all these moments the same thing happens: a brief gap opens between perception and the next action. In this gap it is decided whether the process continues or whether it is left to lie.

The gap is short. A second, perhaps two. It is also not loud. It is not accompanied by a sign saying: here is something you should attend to now. On the contrary — it is usually quiet, inconspicuous, easier to skip than to perceive. It requires of the perceiver a tiny effort: not to walk on, but to stand still. This effort is what decides the matter.

It is worth not underestimating this second. On it rest, in the sum of many persons over many years, the developments that will later be told as historical turning points. On it rests, in the individual case, the fate of an invention, a project, an encounter that would have taken a different course had someone breathed differently in that second. This is no mysticism. It is the sober observation that most plans do not come about, because their plans did not provide for them, and that the plans which do come about rest in a surprisingly high percentage on an unplanned second in which someone stood still.

III. What the structures do with this second

The large organisations of our time — corporations, government agencies, ministries, universities, parties — are set up to eliminate the second of unplanned attention. This is not malice but logic. An organisation that wants to be efficient must direct the attention of its employees toward the tasks for which they were hired. Attention that strays in other directions is, from the organisation's perspective, waste. It is not captured in the target system, it is not rewarded in performance reviews, it is the first thing sacrificed under deadline pressure.

This has a very concrete consequence. Whoever, in a large organisation, gives attention to a stranger's invention has no provision for it in their job description. Whoever answers an unplanned email has no directive to do so. Whoever sets a new project in motion out of a chance encounter must defend it before a chain of command that asked for none of it. The organisation systematically optimises for the probable and filters out the improbable. Precisely where chance would offer something, no one is left to take it — not because the personnel is bad, but because the personnel was neither selected nor compensated for it.

From this follows a remarkable property of large organisations: as they grow in size and age, they become ever less capable of recognising what is new. They can produce what is new when someone hands them the specification. They cannot recognise what is new when it offers itself to them without specification. This is the structural disadvantage of the large against the small — not the smaller resource endowment, since resources the large have, but the smaller attention for the unplanned. The large are rich in resources and poor in attention. The small are poor in resources and rich in attention. In phases of quiet continuity the large win. In phases of technological or social upheaval the small win — often enough.

IV. The attitude that chance requires

Whoever wants to give chance a chance must cultivate an attitude that everyday speech names only inadequately. It is not openness in the soft sense, since openness can also be arbitrariness. It is not curiosity in the usual sense, since curiosity can also flicker aimlessly in all directions. It is a specific form of attention that brings together two properties hard to hold together at once: concentration on one's own undertaking, and at the same time the readiness to interrupt that undertaking for a moment when something unexpected appears.

This is not accidentally difficult. Concentration and interruption-readiness are, in a certain sense, opposites. Whoever is fully concentrated does not notice the unexpected. Whoever is fully interruption-ready does not get on with their own work. The attitude that chance requires is the art of cultivating both at once — being concentrated enough to work on a matter, and at the same time being awake enough to notice when something appears at the edge of the field of vision that might have to do with one's own matter.

This attitude cannot be resolved upon. It is practised through life in a certain environment, or unlearned through life in another. Whoever spends years in an apparatus that does not provide for the unplanned learns to overlook the unplanned. Whoever spends years in an environment in which the unplanned was experienced as a source of the valuable learns to recognise it. Both are habit. Both can be changed, but not overnight.

V. What this attitude sustains when structures no longer do

An observation that emerges from what has been said so far is concrete and load-bearing. In times when the established structures lose their claim — because they have grown too large, too slow, too occupied with defending what already exists — the single person who remains true to the attitude described above takes on a significance that would not be visible in quieter times.

When the apparatuses no longer take up concerns from the realm of actual processes, because their filter layers have grown denser, then it is the single persons who pass a concern along, because they granted it a moment of attention. When the funding landscape fails to recognise an invention because it does not fit its categories, then it is the single person who forwards the invention to someone who might do something with it. When the structures of political representation no longer reflect a voice, then it is the single persons who listen to a voice without being rewarded for doing so.

This is not a strategy that can be planned, nor one that is guaranteed to work. Very many single attentional moments remain without consequence. But under the condition that enough single persons exist who do not let their attention be entirely absorbed by the structures, something forms out of the sum of their single moments that to some extent replaces the failing structures — a loose net through which what the structures no longer let through still finds a way.

This net is informal, unstable, dissolvable at any time. It has no institutional protection. It hangs on every single person who carries it. When these persons grow tired, die one by one, are absorbed into other apparatuses in which they lose their attitude — then the net tears at that place, and what would have flowed through it no longer flows. But as long as the net holds, so does a possibility that would no longer be given in the large structures.

VI. What follows from this

It is not this essay's claim to call for a reform of the structures. That has been attempted elsewhere and can be attempted further elsewhere. The observation intended here is a different and a smaller one — even if in its consequence it is the larger.

Whoever finds that the structures in which they move no longer enable them to do what would have to be done has a limited set of options. They can want to reform the structure — that takes a long time, succeeds rarely, and never succeeds fast enough to cover one's own lifespan. They can leave the structure — that is possible, but not for everyone, and the structures outside the structures are narrower than they appear from inside the structures. They can stay in the structure and not let its logic become fully operative within their own person — that is, preserve a private island of attention on which different rules still apply.

This third option is the least spectacular of the three and perhaps the most effective. It demands no institutional change, no change of profession, no courage for the grand gesture. It demands only this: in the daily round of the structures, to look one second longer when something unexpected happens. Not to delete an email at once. Not to close a link at once. Not to dismiss a question at once as off-topic. Not to overlay an invention immediately with the plausibility check of the prevailing state of knowledge.

The sum of these seconds is, in a society in which the structures grow tired, what remains to keep open the possibilities that the structures no longer keep open. It is a modest observation, but it is not trivial. In a situation in which the great clearing-out is not on offer, the small attention is not a consolation prize. It is what actually still holds.

Whoever has once understood this can begin the day differently. Not with the resolve to accomplish something great. Rather with the resolve not to evade the one or other second that will appear unannounced today. That is little to ask. It is also almost everything that can be asked.