Serendipity, Error, and Exaptation: How Breakthroughs Often Really Happen

 

Serendipity, Error, and Exaptation: How Breakthroughs Often Really Happen

Innovation is often narrated as if it begins with a clear goal and ends with a planned solution. In my experience, the more accurate story is that progress frequently comes from how people respond when reality deviates from the plan. Serendipity, error, and exaptation describe three different “routes” by which useful novelty emerges each with a distinct learning posture.

Serendipity: value found off the critical path

For me, serendipity is not random luck; it is prepared attention. It happens when a team is working toward one objective, notices an unexpected outcome, and has the curiosity (and permission) to investigate it rather than discard it as noise. A classic example is the discovery of PTFE (later branded as Teflon) in 1938, when Roy Plunkett working with refrigerant-related gases encountered an unanticipated polymerized solid that turned out to have remarkable properties (American Physical Society, 2021). 

In my own work, serendipity shows up when reviewing system logs for performance trends and noticing “odd” patterns (timing, access sequences, or failures) that point to a different issue, such as workflow weaknesses or emerging risk. The discovery is unplanned, but the benefit comes from choosing to follow the anomaly.

Error: the productive side of failure if you analyze it

Error, as I see it, is not merely “making mistakes.” It is the phenomenon where a misstep reveals a better path but only if the organization treats failure as a source of insight instead of something to hide. An illustrative example is the implantable pacemaker: Wilson Greatbatch reportedly used an incorrect resistor value while building a circuit, causing the device to pulse in a way that suggested a heartbeat rhythm, which helped spark a lifesaving medical technology pathway (University at Buffalo, n.d.).

In technical environments, I associate error-driven innovation with disciplined postmortems: a configuration mistake or process gap may cause a disruption, but the long-term “innovation” is the improved control design (better validation checks, clearer role-based access, automated guardrails). The key is an environment where errors are surfaced early, diagnosed honestly, and converted into system improvements.

Exaptation: repurposing an existing capability into a new job

Exaptation, to me, is strategic reuse taking something built for one purpose and redeploying it to solve a different problem, often creating a new product category. Slack is a good innovation example: it began as an internal communication tool built by a team developing the game Glitch, then was repurposed into a standalone collaboration platform when the original product direction changed (Slack, n.d.).

I see exaptation constantly in digital operations: telemetry collected for compliance becomes threat-hunting data; a workflow tool built for ticketing becomes a performance intelligence system; a prototype built for one customer segment becomes a scalable offering in another market.

Closing thought

These three concepts describe different responses to the unexpected: serendipity rewards noticing, error rewards reflection, and exaptation rewards recombination. Collectively, they suggest that innovation is less about perfect foresight and more about building habits and cultures that can convert surprises into advantage.

Blog note: After posting this in the Discussion Board, copy it to your blog.

References

American Physical Society. (2021). April 6, 1938: Discovery of Teflon. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/202104/history.cfm

Slack. (n.d.). What is Slack and how does it work? https://slack.com/resources/why-use-slack/what-is-slack-and-how-does-it-work

University at Buffalo. (n.d.). Internal pacemaker (Research highlight). https://medicine.buffalo.edu/research/research_highlights.host.html/content/shared/smbs/research_highlights/pacemaker.detail.html

Smithsonian Magazine. (2024, August 20). The long, strange history of Teflon. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-long-strange-history-of-teflon-the-indestructible-product-nothing-seems-to-stick-to-180984920/

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