Treat errors as adjacent-possible expansion events

When something goes wrong, ask what new territory the failure has made visible that success would have hidden.

Why it works

Johnson argues that serendipitous discoveries often originate in errors — unexpected results that reveal a new adjacent possible not anticipated in the original plan. This only produces value if the explorer stays curious about the error rather than discarding it as noise. Framing errors as information, rather than failure, is what makes the adjacent expansion happen. Most errors contain a latent map of what the original plan did not account for.

How to do it

1. When a plan fails or produces unexpected results, spend 15 minutes on a "failure debrief": what actually happened and what did the plan not predict?
2. Ask specifically: "What new territory does this error reveal? What adjacent possibilities have become visible that were not visible before?"
3. Write one sentence: "The failure showed me that ___"
4. Identify whether any failure-revealed territory is worth exploring deliberately.

Evidence

Error analysis in expertise research consistently shows that deliberate reflection on failure (rather than avoidance) accelerates skill development. Experimental evidence from learning research finds that errors followed by corrective feedback produce stronger encoding than error-free practice. (observational)

The learning-from-errors research is primarily about skill acquisition; the adjacent-possible framing of errors as creative expansion events is Johnson’s theoretical point, supported by historical cases rather than controlled studies.

Sources

• Metcalfe (2017), learning from errors, Annual Review of Psychology

Common mistake

Treating the error debrief as a blame-assignment exercise rather than a territory-mapping one — the question is not who caused the failure but what it reveals.