Chapter 5: Capillaries – The Hidden Pathways of Flow
Navigating the Lifeblood of Systems Without Getting Stuck in the Bureaucratic Clot
There’s a trick to building an engine that runs on chance: you don’t build it all at once. Serendipity isn’t a lightning bolt out of the blue—it’s a network of tiny wires humming quietly in the background. It’s an engine that’s alive because its smallest parts are constantly moving—day after day, touchpoint by touchpoint, experiment by experiment, test by test, email by email. Luca Dellanna in “Ergodicity” calls these small, unnoticed elements capillaries.
Think of them like the tiny blood vessels that keep your body running. The big arteries may get the spotlight, but without the capillaries, you’re dead. Simple as that. Systems—whether they’re organizations, habits, or personal routines—work the same way. Big moves are useless without the small ones feeding into them.
This is the real work: paying attention to the capillaries, the micro-level habits and decisions that grease the gears of your life or business. If you want to engineer serendipity, you have to build with capillaries in mind.
Micro-Actions Drive Macro-Outcomes
Dellanna says, “Strategy doesn’t fail at the macro level; it fails in the capillaries.” Big ideas and high-level strategies die in the day-to-day grind. They don’t get derailed by massive disruptions—most of the time, they slowly unravel because nobody notices the small things going wrong until it’s too late. Missed conversations, forgotten follow-ups, habits left to decay.
If you want serendipity—the surprise opportunities and unexpected outcomes that move you forward—you have to pay attention to these micro-level actions. The capillaries matter.
Here’s the kicker: Capillaries multiply serendipity. They create the conditions where tiny, random collisions of ideas, actions, and feedback generate opportunities. Each micro-move becomes a potential node in the web of unexpected connections—but only if you keep the flow alive.
Clogged Capillaries Kill Flow
Every system becomes brittle when its capillaries clog. Call it bureaucratic sclerosis. It’s what happens when too much authority or attention gets concentrated at the top, leaving the lower layers starved. Knowledge stops flowing. Good ideas die before they reach anyone who can do something about them. That’s how engines seize.
If you want a system that’s alive with chance—where surprise and opportunity flourish—you have to keep the capillaries open. That means:
Empowering local decision-making—letting people at every level act without waiting for permission.
Creating lightweight systems for feedback, where ideas and information flow easily.
Developing habits that reinforce constant movement—small but deliberate actions, every day, all the time.
This isn’t just about avoiding failure. It’s about thriving under pressure. Good capillaries make your system antifragile—it doesn’t just survive shocks, it gets better because of them. Randomness becomes fuel. Pressure creates motion. The engine stays running.
Building Capillaries into Your Life and Work
So how do you keep the capillaries flowing? Simple: you design for small movements with high frequency. Think micro-habits—actions so small they almost seem invisible, but that compound over time.
Here’s what this looks like:
Daily habits that generate flow: Journal every morning, follow up on that idea you had last week, reach out to one new person. These habits aren’t flashy, but they’re the capillaries that make everything else run.
Decentralized communication: Build workflows that let information travel without bottlenecks. Create teams that can move fast without waiting for approvals. Let ideas flow horizontally, not just vertically.
Feedback loops everywhere: Every interaction—every email, message, and coffee chat—becomes part of the feedback web. You don’t know which one will spark something unexpected, but the more threads you weave, the more likely it becomes.
The goal is to create a probability landscape—a system filled with so many tiny interactions that the odds of serendipity increase exponentially. The magic lies in the movement.
The Fragility of Inaction
Ignore the capillaries at your own peril. Stop journaling, stop following up, let the emails pile up—and watch as your engine grinds to a halt. Nothing interesting happens anymore.
That’s the cost of clogged capillaries: the flow dies. And with it, the serendipity.
This is why motion matters more than perfection. The point isn’t to execute flawlessly. It’s to keep the wheels turning—to maintain the flow of small actions and decisions that keep the capillaries open and your engine alive.
Conclusion: Serendipity Runs on Capillaries
Dellanna’s capillaries are the hidden pathways of flow. Without them, even the most brilliant strategy fails. With them, random collisions become opportunities, and the unexpected becomes routine.
If you want to build an engine for serendipity, start with the small things. Feed the capillaries. Keep the flow alive. The engine doesn’t run on magic—it runs on tiny, deliberate actions repeated over and over until one day, something clicks.
And when it does? That’s not luck. That’s the slow, steady current of capillaries aligning the right actions, exactly where they need to be, at the right time.