Platforms and Serendipity
Pleasantly Surprised on Platforms !
How have you been keeping up with your schedules ? Or are you experimenting more with your time ?
Have you gone off-routine lately ? By design, by choice or compelled ?
What facet of your life is more automated and which ones are still free flowing?
What roles have platforms played in this transition? Do let me known the comments section.
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DTW
During the Week, we had an extended discussion in my MaP (Managing Platform Businesses) class at IBS Hyderabad on the role of platforms specially their algorithms in determining our online virtual behaviour and the subsequent offline real lives. Few students pointed out that our discovery processes have been intermediated by platforms and we seem to have been left with very algorithmic choices vis-a-vis music, art, food, clothes, books, destinations, political thoughts and even relationships.
Before we mover further, let me share one of my favourite scene from the Kung Fu Panda is when Master Oogway tells Shifu - “My old friend, the panda will never fulfill his destiny, nor you yours, until you let go of the illusion of control.”
When we look at platforms, we see a very interesting relationship between Platforms and Discovery. On one hand platforms enable discovery by bringing supply and demand over an electronic marketplace at scale mostly through discovering long tail products. But, they also seem to constrain our choices by hogging our attention and limiting it to the choices offered only on the platform. In my opinion, key difference is SERENDIPITY or rather lack of it over platforms.
Platforms help in making serendipitous connections via their discovery mechanisms. Twin design principles of Digital Platforms related to discovery are- Designing for Thickness and Alleviating Congestion.
By expanding the scope of trade/transactions, platforms create multitude of opportunities for buyers and sellers to fulfil their objectives. They might use bundling (Google Suite) or partitioning (Fractal Shares) to manage the number of tradable transaction on the platforms. Platforms might also use commodification of their users or assets to create a more homogenous offering leading to better discovery. By ensuring both synchronous and asynchronous transactions, platforms might enable discovery amongst time-heterogeneous groups.
Theoretically , platforms would end up attracting heterogenous users which is good for variety on it but leads to unfulfilled value-creating transactions and thus is a sub-optimal result. Use of recommendation engines based on community-generated and individual user-generated information can ensure efficient search and subsequent discovery. Transactions on the platform mostly behaviour exhibited by both community and individual users is also a significant source of data for creating a basic sorting facility. Information and Behaviour data usage can lead to an efficient recommendation/matching making interface thus reducing congestion on the platform. Emerging social commerce players like Pinduoduo have made discovery their secret sauce through a combination of social, entertainment and commerce.
Serendipitous connection have been made on the social platforms and launched careers/companies.
This tweet reply by Ryan Graves got him a job as first employee at Uber and eventually CEO of the company and billionaire.
He was responding to the following tweet by Travis Kalanick, Founder of UBER..
Platforms by design are meant for a WTA (Winner Take All) world. This also implies that they curtail customer’s choices. I mean if Master Oogway would have followed Shifu’s advice, we would have missed out discovery Po who eventually became a Dragon Warrior. More like, how Fortnite is being shackled by the duopoly of Apple and Google.
Some of us crave for the life which is less planned and more free flowing but alas platforms through their weapon of notifications keep us on the slow drip of pre-programmed algorithmic life. It has become even more pronounced during the pandemic and subsequent lockdown where the opportunity of serendipitous encounters over water coolers/coffee breaks have vanished. I mean, scheduled WFH Friday Evening HR Sanctioned Social with your own Coffee/Tea are good for manuals but are poor substitute of real world interactions.
Of course, there have pre-pandemic efforts like LivingRoom Conversations which have become even more relevant and useful during pandemic induced WFH scenarios. All the public spaces of our unstructured conversation have been out of reach for almost 6 months now and that has serious repercussions as our ideas are formed and shaped by free flowing discussions with acquaintance as well as strangers. Many of my most entertaining and enriching discussions have been on Sunday Long Runs with my running buddies at PeeranCheruvu Runners. No agenda and No Topic-just going with the flow of run and our thoughts. But then I have been lucky to have had the luxury of being surrounded by interesting people.
Of course, you have to be at the right place and right time for things to fall in place. I always believed that many of my life changing moments have been pure accidents but like Master Oogway says- There are no accidents. Christian Busch in his book The Serendipity Mindset argues that we could train ourselves to be “lucky” by connecting ourselves with everything around us with the possibilities that they represent.
I like “Luck by Chance” directed by Zoya Akhtar which has a plot twist of Farhan Akhtar getting a lead role by chance and Konkana (She is the REAL STAR) missing out on the opportunity. You would also see a caricature of Bollywood nepotism in full shame in the movie. Though in typical Bollywood fashion, it ends well for Konkana as well when she realises her potential as TV STAR !
OTW
Over the Weekend, I was part of Hyderabad Runners Webinar series titled “Beyond the Track” and had the pleasure of listening to a Teachers’ Day special with Siddartha Menon- An Educationist, Runner and Poet. Among the many insights, I was most impressed by how he dealt with BQ and Boston Marathon DNF. Now, for the non-runners, you have to qualify by running a Full Marathon in a specified time (usually much faster) to be able to considered for Boston Marathon. Siddartha Menon did get the qualification and ran the Boston Marathon. But he got hypothermia and had to opt out of the run hence a DNF (Did Not Finish). In words of Rudyard Kipling, he treated the twin imposters of Success (BQ) and Failure (DNF) with equanimity and continued on his running journey. You can watch the full webinar recording here on Hyderabad Runners Facebook Page.
Talking about serendipity and platforms, I am reminded of how actor-director Rajat Kapoor tweeted angrily about lack of producers for his now critically acclaimed film Ankhon Dekhi and Manish Mundra responding positively leading to an interesting relationship and Drishyam Films. Otherwise, we would have been tragically living in a world with out Ankhon Dekhi or Masaan or Kaamyaab !
Of course , I was also blessed to have received your Teacher’s Day wishes over phone, email, WhatsApp and myriad other platforms. Many of my friendships from classroom are result of serendipitous encounters and of course nurtured through multiple platforms including this weekly newsletter. In fact, some of them did not even start in classroom. They started because of our common interests and of course a divine connection that is definitely not accident. I have talked about it earlier on platforms and relationships but let me quote Late Hindi Poet Yogesh from his immortal song from movie Anand which sums up this relationship of ours.
कहीं तो ये, दिल कभी, मिल नहीं पाते कहीं से निकल आए, जनमों के नाते
Stay Blessed.
I Love You
Shailendra
I loved how you connected platforms with serendipity and related it with an amazing movie. And yes, I agree partially that you have to be at the right place and right time for things to fall in place, the other side of me says that you have to make a choice to be somewhere to get something you want :)