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Murphy and Serendipity in Supply Chain are two faces of the same coin.
Supply Chain professionals often talk about Murphy hitting them from time to time. They also sometimes, though much less, talk about lucky occurrences resulting in windfall benefits.
These two phenomena are nothing but two extreme possibilities of any event affecting the supply chain. You may like to categorize them as ‘outside 3 sigma limits’ (though such events don’t typically follow a normal distribution).
Here is an interesting fact. Empirical studies have shown that chances of Murphy and Serendipity are roughly the same, but we tend to talk more about Murphy (to explain the performance gaps) and much less about Serendipity!
How do you design your supply chain to protect against Murphy and exploit Serendipitous events?