I just finished Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable The Swerve [1]. Professor Greenblatt guides us through the wanderings of the main character, book hunter Poggio Barcciolini, who finds the lost manuscript of  Lucretius’ poem “On the Nature of the Universe” that was to influence the start of the Renaissance and scientific and humanistic thought for centuries thereafter. The book’s key underlying theme, the unexpected collisions of tiny particles as a foundation for the universe, leads this blog to ask how events and people engaged in business, the non-profit sector, or academia (organizational atoms) handle unexpected collisions. In...