In a fast-changing world, many of the strategies, tools, and mindsets that we grew used to ­do not work anymore. Our tendency to simply plan and map out the future does not do justice to the complexities and intricacies of many societal and environmental issues. It requires us to develop a mindset that leverages uncertainty and the unknown as a pathway to innovation, impact, and “smart luck.”

How can we set ourselves up for this “smart luck,” to be able to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes, in even the most challenging of contexts? These are some of the questions that The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck aims to answer.

The following edited excerpt from Chapter 3: The Open Mind, highlights an example of this approach, and how reframing situations via bricolage (“making the best out of what is at hand”) can foster hope and (social) innovation.

The organization that I studied for the last five years, Reconstructed Living Labs (RLabs), provides an interesting example of how innovative community-driven solutions can be developed by locals, for locals, in the most challenging of conditions. However, while this approach has been successful in reaching hundreds of thousands of people in resource-constrained settings, it does need to go hand in hand with tackling structural inequality.

Read the full article about community-driven solutions by Christian Busch at Stanford Social Innovation Review.