Questions for you:
- When did you last encounter an unexpected result or “mistake” in your work, and did you investigate it, or just dismiss it as an error?
- What safeguards or quality control processes in your work might be inadvertently eliminating the conditions where useful accidents could occur?
- How much slack time exists in your schedule for exploring interesting anomalies that don’t fit your current project’s objectives, or grant requirements?
- If Fleming had followed modern laboratory protocols strictly, would penicillin have been discovered – and what does that suggest to you about the trade-off between rigour and serendipity?
Organisational applications:
Research and development protocols: Build “anomaly investigation time” into project schedules. When experimental results don’t match predictions, require teams to spend at least two hours exploring why before discarding the data. Many breakthroughs hide in the gap between expectation and observation.
Laboratory and workspace design: Resist the urge to over-compartmentalise. Create shared spaces where researchers from different disciplines encounter each other’s work accidentally. Post-it notes emerged from 3M’s culture of allowing researchers to attend each other’s seminars and share preliminary findings.
Funding and evaluation criteria: Reserve a portion of research budgets for “exploratory detours” – allowing investigators to pursue unexpected findings even when they diverge from stated project goals. Evaluate researchers partly on their ability to recognise and develop serendipitous observations, not solely on meeting predefined milestones.
Failure documentation and review: Establish internal systems for publicising “interesting detours” – experiments that didn’t achieve their goal but produced unexpected and useful results. Not only does this show the opportunistic nature of research work, but the detour may prove useful to other internal departments or teams.
Further reading
History of accidental discoveries
The Golem: What You Should Know About Science by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch – examines how scientific progress actually happens, including the role of accident, contamination, and error in major breakthroughs, challenging sanitised accounts that retrospectively impose order on messy discovery processes.
The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman – explores how scientific knowledge changes over time, documenting cases where accepted “facts” were overturned by accidental discoveries that contradicted established understanding, revealing science as more provisional than textbooks suggest.
“The role of serendipity in drug discovery” in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience by Thomas A. Ban – surveys major pharmaceutical discoveries that emerged from accidental observations, including penicillin, Viagra, and numerous psychiatric medications, arguing that eliminating “contamination” from trials may reduce therapeutic innovation.
Laboratory culture and creativity
- Lab Girl by Hope Jahren – memoir of a working scientist describing the reality of laboratory research, including equipment failures, contamination events, and unexpected results that shaped her career, providing insight into how accidents function in contemporary science.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn – classic analysis arguing that major scientific advances often require breaking established protocols and investigating anomalies that “normal science” would dismiss, suggesting that excessive methodological rigour can impede paradigm shifts.
- The Serendipity Mindset by Christian Busch – empirical research on how scientists and innovators create conditions for productive accidents, distinguishing between passive luck and active serendipity-seeking behaviours.
Modern research practices and innovation
“Why most published research findings are false” by John Ioannidis in PLOS Medicine – provocative analysis of how modern research practices, including publication bias and methodological restrictions, may reduce the field’s ability to recognise genuinely novel findings, particularly those emerging from unexpected sources.
Loonshots by Safi Bahcall – examines organisational structures that enable “wild ideas” to survive, arguing that most companies and research institutions inadvertently create cultures where unexpected findings get suppressed because they don’t fit funding categories or career incentives.
The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell – critiques the innovation-obsessed culture that demands predictable breakthroughs on schedule, arguing this mindset makes true discovery less likely by eliminating the exploratory slack time where accidents can be productively investigated.
Interactive exhibit
See how better tidiness would have stopped 15 major inventions from coming to be… https://experiments.randomthebook.com/tidy/
About the image
A microwave oven taken from the cover of its user guide, represented in three of my favourite colours.
Illustration by Matt Ballantine, 2026
Random the Book 