ABSTRACT
For contemporary cultural organizations to become Houses of Learning and support research and innovation then relationships between the organizational inside and the creative ecology out there is a key factor. And this may ask cultural professionals to develop ways of thinking and acting that are quite counter-intuitive to the normal routines of organizational life. The first facet of professional counter-intuitiveness comes from the recognition of serendipity happy accident within creative innovation. Scientific management quickly became central to virtually all theories of management, and it is still with us today. To revive John Barths nautical metaphor, we will need an anchor when our meandering journey to Serendip is done, otherwise we might drift right past it. Johnson refers to the process of exaptation as the process whereby adaptations originally created for one use get recycled for something else. Being wrong in our problem-solving searches helps us to frame better questions and sometimes re-see the often two-way relationships between problems and solutions.
