References

DeLozier, Judith & Grinder, John, Turtles All The Way Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius (Grinder, DeLozier and Associates, 1987)

Fine, Gary & Deegan, James, “Three Principles of Serendip: Insight, Chance, and Discovery in Qualitative Research”. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol 9, Issue 4, Oct 1996, pp 434-447 www.ul.ie/~philos/vol2/deegan.html

Gladwell, Malcom, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Allen Lane, 2005)

Gritton, Jim, “Of Serendipity, Free Association and Aimless Browsing: Do They Lead to Serendipitous Learning?”
www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/gallery/gritton_serendipitous_learning/conclusion/assets/assignment_print_version.pdf

Johnson, Steven B, ‘Can We Please Kill This Meme Now?’ (2006)
www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/05/can_we_please_k.html

Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd Ed., Chicago, 1996)

Mendonca, Sandro, et. al. "Unsought Innovation: Serendipity in Organizations" presented to Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics, 25th Conference, 2008.
www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewpaper.php?id=3235&cf=29

Roberts, Royston M, Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science (Wiley, 1989)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin, 2008)

Tavris, Carol & Aronson, Elliot, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts (2008).

Footnotes

¹ Sagacious - having or showing keen mental discernment and good judgment.  From Latin sagax, ‘wise’

² Robert Merton (1968) as quoted by Fine and Deegan. There must have been many potentially serendipitous events that were never recognised as such — we’d wage many more than were actually recognised.

³ In a client-facilitator context this part of the model owes a debt of gratitude to Milton Erickson’s notion of ‘utilisation’.

⁴ Ethnography - The scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures. Accounts of how ethnographers work sound remarkably similar to how Symbolic Modellers work.  At times one could be forgiven for forgetting that the main difference is that ethnographers work in real cultures and Symbolic Modellers work with metaphoric ones.

⁵ Wits - Comes from the Scandinavian “manvit: intelligence manifested as common sense, shrewdness, and flexibility” (Wax, 1971 quoted in Fine and Deegan)

⁶ In Symbolic Modelling an analogy with the ethnographic relationship is the relationship between the facilitator and symbols in the client’s Metaphor Landscape.

⁷ These processes should be familiar to the Symbolic Modeller — “juxtaposition” (adjacency); “reference query” (clean question); “surfacing hidden analogies” (bringing unconscious metaphors into awareness).

⁸ Quoted in ‘Trusting Therapists’ Intuition’, editorial in Psychotherapy Networker (May-June 2008, pp. 16-17).

⁹ See our paper 'Cognitive Dissonance and Creative Tension — the same or different?' (Oct 2009),  cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/262/