That blue splodge
I had a meeting the other day, and in the meeting I suggested we do some drawing. I like drawing in meetings; I find that it creates a kind of communal sense of "doing something else", which can help people loosen up and make space for creative thinking and communication.
As I was priming one of my paint pens, a massive globule of bright blue paint accidentally oozed out onto one of my drawings. My initial reaction was something along the lines of "bugger" - I felt I had ruined the page I was working on. But then I thought, "well, I wonder…" and smooshed another piece of paper on top of it, creating two totally chaotic but rather lovely shapes, overlaid onto the more controlled, albeit free form and semi-random, shapes I was drawing.
I spent the rest of the meeting thinking about that splodge. About how I was making something, something that I considered playful, which was interrupted by something unexpected. And initially, I dismissed that interruption. But when I stopped thinking in terms of value judgements on the work - is it good, or bad? - and instead wondered "what if", I experimented with the disruption. And from that experimentation came something more interesting than I had originally expected.
It struck me that this is what research is like. Projects are a mixture of organised structure and chaotic splodges. What first looks like a mistake can turn out to be a breakthrough, if we’re unprecious enough to explore it.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson: the most interesting discoveries often happen in the smudges — the moments we didn’t plan, couldn’t control, and might be tempted to cover up. Keeping space for those accidents, and treating them as part of the process rather than failures, is what turns tidy plans into something alive, surprising, and worth sharing.
