An idea Grex shared with me once, and stuck in my mind:
Conversations, magazines, and great cities provide a kind of "scoped serendipity" that people seek in productive creative processes.
Scoped serendipity is something in between the wild lawlessness of complete randomness and the predictable mundanity of rigid structure. Sometimes, it's editorial curation (as in magazines), sometimes it's "the algorithm" (Twitter at its best), and sometimes it's just being in a place where the right people or ideas are flying about frequently enough that you bump into them sooner or later (conversations, cities).
How do we create scoped serendipity in creative workflows/tools?