My desk - wherever that happens to be these days - is very good at making me feel productive.

The inbox is there. The to-do list is there. The calendar is full. I sit down to get a few things done and, before I know it, several hours have passed. I have answered emails, made decisions, moved things forward and cleared a few jobs from the list.

And most days, that is exactly what the business needs from me.

But I have been thinking lately about what the desk quietly costs us.

Because here is what my desk has never delivered: the conversation I did not plan to have. The person I was not expecting to meet. The passing comment over coffee that became a piece of work, a partnership, a new idea, or a friendship that lasted well beyond the event itself.

None of that happens neatly in the calendar.

You cannot block out 2:00pm to 2:30pm for a chance encounter. Serendipity, by definition, does not work like that. The desk is where scheduled things get done. Important things, yes, but scheduled things.

Being a “veteran” in the business events industry, I know I am biased. But when you strip it back, this is one of the things business events do so well.

We build the program, the floorplan, the run sheet, the registration process, the speaker briefings and all the structure around the day. But underneath all of that is something much less controlled: the hope that the right people end up in the same room at the same time, and that something happens between them that neither of them came for.

Often, the session itself is not where the most valuable moment happens.

It is the corridor afterwards. The dinner where you are seated next to someone you have never met. The queue for coffee. The conversation that starts with, 'Do you mind if I join you?' The idea that only appears because two people were in the room together.

When I think about the business events I have attended over the years - in different cities, different countries, often a long way from my desk in Melbourne - what I remember most is not the notes I took.

It is the people.

The conversations I am still having. The connections that became clients, collaborators, colleagues and friends. The ideas that came from being in the room, not from being efficient.

That is the part we sometimes forget.

Showing up is not the inefficient option. It is the price of entry for everything you cannot manufacture from behind a screen.

The desk feels safe because the cost of staying there is almost invisible. You do not see the introduction you did not make. You do not see the opportunity that never started. You do not see the idea that needed a hallway, a coffee queue, or a stranger to come alive.

You just quietly go without it and call it a productive week.

So no, we cannot schedule serendipity.

But we can create the conditions for it.

We can say yes to the trip. We can go to the thing. We can leave a little space in the day for the unplanned conversation. We can remember that not every valuable outcome can be measured by what was on the agenda.

The desk, in whatever form it takes that day, will still be there when we get back.

The inbox always is.

But the good stuff - the unexpected, useful, generous, business-changing stuff - is usually out there somewhere, in a room, waiting for us to turn up.