Innovation and creativity often come from unexpected places and accidents rather than strict planning. Many great discoveries and innovations were results of chance, open-mindedness, freedom to experiment and willingness to adapt plans based on unexpected opportunities and insights. Successful organizations encourage informal conversations, diversity of ideas, tolerance for ambiguity and allow people freedom to explore without being limited by rigid structures or plans.

1. Innovation

2. There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison When design is a process, it's dynamic and adaptable. - Neilsen Norman Co-Founder, Donald Norman Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. - Poet, Ovid Fundamentally, we work to create and only incidentally do we work to eat. - Writers, Willis Harman and John Hormann No central authority has cultivated the Web as a beautiful garden. It grows on its own as an ecosystem. - Internet ecologist, Bernardo Huberman The market changes so rapidly that at any moment you have to give up what you are for what you could be. - CEO Mailboxes Etc. More than half the world's greatest discoveries have been made through serendipity - the finding of one thing while looking for something else. - Author Melvin Saunders Creativity comes from freedom. - W. Edwards Deming A discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind. - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

3. Planning

4. Plan making is an activity that can unintentionally curtail and even destroy creative thought and action in an organization . - NDI International founder, Jerry Hirshberg All projects change in the course of their journey. It's best to start with a plan and expect accidents along the way--accidents that allow you to revise the plan, "plus" the plan, and make it far better than when the journey began. - Author, Don Hahn If you want meaningful coincidences to change the story of your life, wander around the world randomly and willing to listen to whatever life presents. - There Are No Accidents Author, Robert Hopcke One way we avoid complacency...is that we reject the idea of long-range planning. - Herb Kelleher When you write everything down in a manual, people in the field read it. Worse, they base their decisions on it. - Patrick Kelly, CEO PSS/World If planning means not being open to opportunity, it won't work. - Peter Drucker, Management Guru Envisage a plan which does not take a single goals as its final end, a plan in which each successive goal emerges and grows from the process of planning itself. - Cultural anthropologist Tadao Umesao Good planning should never unnecessarily limit choices; it should expand them. - Author Max Dublin The lesson for every hitchhiker now traveling on the information highway: The best things in life happen not as planned, but by accident. Fast Company writer, Harriet Rubin

5. Organization

6. Informality gives you speed. It takes the crap out of the business equation, the pontificating. - Jack Welch You can't nourish passion with more rules! - Author, Meg Wheatley Everything that has happened for me is a fluke. - Michael Moore, Filmmaker The clarity and simplicity of command and control make it irresistable. It is easy to plan and easy to implement. It is the perfect means to postpone the struggle over real, shared accountability. - Peter Block, author In this new world, you and I make it up as we go along, not because we lack expertise or planning skills, but because that is the nature of reality. - Ury Merry, Author My vision is that of a radically decentralized chaordic organization where tolerance of chaos generates order as in nature. - Dee Hoch, Former Chairman, VISA Int'l The best business ideas come from unplanned conversations. - Janet Ryan, president of JM Ryan Associates Most really useful information comes from informal conversations - Verifone Co-Founder William Pape I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order - Poet, Wistawa Szymborska

7. Random

8. Two serendipitous heads are better than one. - Jane Plank, entrepreneur The best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of free people. - Woodrow Wilson The new model for organizations is the biological world, where uncontrolled actions produce stunningly efficient and robust results all through adaptation and self-organization. - Tom Petzinger, Wall Street Journal writer The more diversity of interactions a particle has, the more complexity, structure, and richer self it has, the more possibilities and probabilities it has. - - Mark Trodden, physicist Remember that entrepreneurship is a behavior, and it can be learned. Within that, I think the most important trait is tolerance for ambiguity. - William Cockrum, consultant I think in hypertext! - Jane Siberry, Canadian singer/songwriter All success boils down to accidents. - Author Tom Peters Straying maps the path - Poet, Rumi Life has a way of feeding you from directions you don't expect. - Sculptor, Ursula von Rydingsvard