Other Plans

 

John Lennon sang that life is what happens when you’re making other plans, and this apt phrase was in use for decades before Lennon included it in a song. The aphorism makes sense to me, as so much of what happens in life seems accidental or unexpected, and often our planning fails to bear the fruit we expected. This is true in innovation as well, with many examples of inventors stumbling upon a key insight by accident, sometimes in stark contrast to their meticulous planning.

Serendipity describes the confluence of circumstances by chance that leads to a good outcome. When all the traffic lights on the commute home, after a long and exhausting day at work, are all green at just the right time – that’s serendipity. No work or action could lead to the outcome, it’s mere chance that the various systems and timers and lights line up just perfectly. (I know, some would argue that transportation engineers carefully evaluate traffic patterns and such, but the lights are all red far more often than they’re all green.) To the extent that there is any skill in a serendipitous discovery, it lies in the individual being open to the possibility of chance playing a positive role and thus able to identify the benefits of serendipity when it occurs. The discovery of vulcanized rubber, which is stronger, more durable, and more elastic than natural rubber, is a great example of a discovery through happy chance, as the inventor, Charles Goodyear, only found the vulcanization method when he dropped a mixture of natural rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove. After years of trying to improve rubber the discovery was made by chance when he just happened to be mixing chemicals near a stove.

Errors are the mistakes that everyone makes. They can be moderated through strong adherence to clear processes and good training but are nearly impossible to fully avoid. Life is simply too complex to never make an error. Errors often are mistakes, and thus the connotation of the word is strongly negative. When I make an error in a complicated spreadsheet analysis at work, no one applauds my discovery of a new form of math. However, errors and mistakes can introduce a degree of randomness in research and scientific work, and sometimes those random factors lead to surprising results. Wilson Greatbatch made a mistake in building a device to record the heartbeat when he built the equipment with the wrong size resistor. The device emitted electrical impulses that have since been used in implantable pacemakers to save lives.

Exaptation is the use of a discovery or capability towards an unplanned purpose, yielding innovation upon innovation. The term arises originally from biology and applies to evolutionary outcomes wherein a feature such as a feather is physiologically coopted for an entirely new purpose, in this case flying. I might use a magazine that was sent to me for the purpose of marketing something I don’t need to buy, instead to smash a bug flying around my office. In a simplistic sense this might be considered exaptation – repurposing one thing for a new need for which it was not designed. The Gutenberg printing press is an example of exaptation in innovation, as Gutenberg repurposed technology that was built for pressing grapes into wine so that he could instead press inked letters into paper.