Sometimes it is as if you’ve had a stroke of luck; you’ve been stuck with a question at work for days and you bump into just the right person in the corridor who knows everything about it. You’d forgotten his or her name or where they worked in the company, but you’d met at a sales conference 2 years ago.

Solving problems at work through serendipity happens more often than you think. Building relationships and maintaining that network is important. However, the chance that you can remember everybody you have ever met or the chance that you spoke to exactly the right person with the right skills that you need today doesn’t always go hand-in-hand.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could see who has which skills in your organization? No doubt you have the go-to colleagues in your area, but do you know the range of skills covered by immediate colleagues? people in the neighbouring department? Or what about your partnering department situated on the other side of the globe?

The more people in an organisation, the more complex it is to identify who has which skills, at what depth, and in what combinations. This lack of transparency is what we call network blindness. Exospect's Strategic Resource Mapping methodology makes that invisible landscape visible — revealing not just where expertise lives, but where the gaps and untapped connections are.

Serendipity is valuable. But it shouldn't be your strategy.