Monday, November 8, 2021

Happy Accidents

We all try to learn from our mistakes. But are we making the most of them?

By André van Heerden, Communications Director

The other day I had a potential disaster turn out really well.

I’m doing some minor renovations in my home. While preparing to paint, I had put all sorts of screws, hooks, outlet plates, and a central vacuum cover in a plastic container so that I wouldn’t lose the small pieces.

Unfortunately, I left the container at the side of the stairs, and my son accidently kicked it over.

The pieces scattered down the stairs and across the floor and over a carpet. Oh no!

The whole point of putting the pieces carefully in the container was to avoid losing them. Now they were everywhere.

After my son and I played the blame game—“How could you not see the container?” “Why did you put it on the stairs?”—we began searching and collecting.

I was particularly worried about some of the smallest pieces that sat within the central vacuum plate as I had already lost a tiny spring. This meant that I couldn’t get a small electrical contact (about the size of a grain of rice) to stick out and the vacuum wouldn’t work.

I had even begun planning to cut and reshape the spring from inside a ball point pen as a solution.

We did our best to gather all the pieces, and to my surprise, we not only found everything that had been widely dispersed but somehow my son even found the missing spring that I had spent the past two days looking for—and that wasn’t in the container to begin with!

I love it when things like this happen and often wonder how often such wonderful mistakes get overlooked.

One of the most famous accidental discoveries was Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. He had been experimenting with a flu virus and went on a two-week holiday.

When he returned, he found mould had grown in his experiment. He noticed that it deterred the virus.

But imagine if Fleming had just seen the mould, got mad, and threw his experiment all away?

A lot has been written and taught about learning from our mistakes. But I think it’s important as well to see if anything useful can be harnessed from them.

When I was working in the film world, I loved working with cinematographer George Tirl, who always looked for the unexpected. During the testing of minimal lighting for one scene, we discovered a way to reduce the amount of a challenging set that needed to be created.

Without being open to the discovery outside of what we were doing, we would’ve spent a lot of unnecessary time and effort elsewhere.

My family has recently been enjoying the reality TV series Baking Impossible. Each episode features a baking challenge that must be solved by a team of a baker and an engineer.

In their pursuit of having to build an edible and delicious floating ship, or a remote control robot, or a runway costume, the teams have discovered some interesting food concoctions that have made a plywood-like chocolate, and a melted gummy-bear with chocolate contact cement.

In the frantic, tension-filled competitions, the show’s judges and competitors all still took the time to note the new inventions. Some even used them to great success later on in other challenges.

Within our daily jobs, are we so quick to jump on and fix mistakes that we possibly miss learning or discovering something new?

Famous pop landscape artist Bob Ross once said on his painting show, “Boy, I know you’re saying, ‘Bob, you’ve made a mess this time.’ You may be right too. I’ve certainly been known to do that. But we don’t make mistakes you know. We have happy accidents.”

It’s a funny saying, but Bob certainly had a talent for making the most of mistakes.

Happy Accidents

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