Bob Ross called…

Physicist Leó Szilárd stood in the drizzling cold at a London curb in 1933, uncomfortable and irritated. He was waiting for a traffic light. As he often did, Szilárd was walking so he could think. He had just attended a lecture by a titan of nuclear physics who’d glibly stated that unlocking the strong-force energy in atoms was “moonshine.”

Then the traffic light changed. So did science. So did human history. Szilárd riffed on the ideas of Niels Bohr, who theorized that the structure of atoms was akin to shells of planet orbits around the sun. He thought: “Could the (red light) stable state of an element be changed into a (green light) exponentially dynamic state, by bombarding it with one neutron (planet) in a way that would release two neutrons (other planets), and so on, and so on?” Such a chain reaction would unleash gargantuan amounts of energy. A dozen years later, this theoretical insight became nuclear fission via the Manhattan Project. But it was conjured by a widely read, imaginative iconoclast who enjoyed the emerging genre of science fiction. Szilárd was especially captivated by H.G. Wells’ book “The World Set Free.”

The annals of science, engineering, and even mathematics are awash with these seemingly stray Big Ideas^™. Some of the most well-known include the offhand discovery of mold that stopped bacterial growth (what eventually became penicillin grew on a cantaloupe in Peoria, Illinois), of radiation (X-rays) that could pierce objects yet register on photo plates, of LEDs, of artificial sweeteners, and of the solution to Fermat’s last theorem. Indeed, dozens if not hundreds of useful knowledge products can be traced to such happy accidents, as documented in a recent book about medical discoveries.

[Despite Alexa, Siri, Google, and other AI voices reporting otherwise, “happy accidents” was not a phrase coined by painter-on-PBS Bob Ross. Bob Ross can be credited with the genius of having a pet named Peapod the Pocket Squirrel.]

More generally, our biggest advances in understanding — including those in organizational science — sometimes arise from unexpected places. They enter sideways rather than from straight, ploddingly incremental steps so often (mis)portrayed by peer-reviewed journal articles. They come from serendipitous connections between thoughts, from small sparks of “hmm …” and “what if?” Louis Pasteur noted this as far back as 1854, saying that in science, “chance favors only the prepared mind.”

So, how do we prepare our minds for Big Ideas^™ that might come from happy accidents? Take reflective daily notes of things we observe. Read as broadly in other fields as we do deeply in our own. Ask ourselves: What if what we know is wrong? Don’t succumb to confirmation bias by dismissing unexpected findings, or anomalous data. Be inquisitive rather than scornful about them; try to repeat them. Pursue the weird. Be more curious than judgmental (thank you, Ted Lasso).

Hüseyin Tanriverdi clearly has such a mind. He’s observed what many of his IT colleagues were interpreting as complex, nonlinear, information systems that often led to calamitous firm outcomes. He’s making good trouble by reinterpreting some such systems as complicated instead, and noting in his “What’s the Big Idea” column that the latter can serve as a tonic rather than as toxic.