Your biggest breakthrough is currently filed under ‘didn’t work’

 

This is a love letter to side effects, happy accidents and the universe’s finest screw ups. BY design, NOT by accident. I dare add.

 

Side Effects Are The Main Event

 

Circa 1989. Pfizer’s lab technicians were hunting for a heart drug. What they got instead was a global cultural phenomenon, four-letter word jokes, and an industry worth $5 billion. The original compound — Sildenafil — was a disappointing chest pain treatment. It barely moved the needle on angina. What it moved, however, was everything else. The clinical trial patients, when asked to return their unused pills, reportedly refused.

 

Read that again. They refused.

 

Pfizer wasn’t trying to fix bedrooms. They were chasing blood pressure. Then boom—Sildenafil blushes its way into history as Viagra. Little wonder patients refused to return the pills.

 

That’s not a side effect. That’s the universe writing you a Post-it Note in capital letters saying: Hey genius, you’re looking at the wrong problem.

 

The prognosis: the “error” got the applause. The obstacle was never the obstacle. The wrong door was always the right hallway.

 

Speaking of Post-it Notes — Dr Spencer Silver at 3M in 1968 was trying to create the world’s strongest adhesive. He made the world’s weakest one instead. An adhesive that stuck gently and peeled off cleanly. For six years, nobody cared. Then Art Fry, a fellow 3M researcher, got annoyed that his church choir bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal. He remembered Silver’s “failed” glue. Stuck it to paper. Stuck that paper to his hymnal. Discovered that 50 billion Post-it Notes would eventually be sold every year.

 

Six years. The answer sat in the drawer for six years waiting for the right question to show up. Its now iconic Canary Yellow color was chosen by happenstance — a lab next door only had scrap yellow paper on hand.

 

The computer mouse(the device that changed how humans interact with machines) is something that millions of us use every day. So, I reckon it would be interesting to understand how this invention of a gadget that we are hand-in-glove with came about. The mouse was inspired by a roll on deodorant. Douglas Engelbart was staring at a butter dish with a rolling ball mechanism, cross-referencing his memory of a roll-on deodorant applicator, and thought: what if I could roll that on a desk and track coordinates? 1968. Almost the same time as the Post-it glue. A phenomenal year for things being used for the wrong reason.

 

What connects Viagra, the Post-it, and the mouse?

 

None of them were invented. They were noticed. Someone looked at a failure, a peculiarity, an anomaly — and instead of filing it under “didn’t work,” they filed it under “works differently than expected.” That is the entire gap between a discoverer and a discarded researcher.

 

It is unfortunate that we are trained — obsessively, institutionally, pathologically — to optimise for the original goal. Hit the target. Solve the brief. Ship the feature. Side effects are noise. Anomalies are bugs. Deviations are failure. We have built entire corporate cultures around the disciplined suppression of accidental discovery.

 

The most expensive thing in any organisation isn’t failure. It’s the failure you dismiss without examining.

 

The question to carry like a loaded gun

 

What unexpected thing happened today that I labelled irrelevant? Because Pfizer’s patients didn’t volunteer information. Someone noticed. 3M’s Silver didn’t quit. Someone listened. Engelbart didn’t see a butter dish. He saw a translation problem with an existing solution.

 

Side effects are first drafts of the next big thing. You just have to be the kind of person who reads the margins.

 

Some more absolute gems for the taking

 

WD-40 — The name is the failure count. Water Displacement, 40th attempt. Thirty-nine times it didn’t work. On the 40th, they got a rust-prevention spray used in nuclear missiles. Today it’s in 4 out of 5 American homes. The failures weren’t the story. They were the address.

 

Corn Flakes — John Harvey Kellogg left cooked wheat sitting out by accident. It went stale. He rolled it anyway. Crispy flakes fell out. He served it to sanitarium patients who were supposed to be eating bland food to suppress “excitement.” It accidentally launched the entire global breakfast cereal industry. A $40 billion market born from forgotten leftovers and a Victorian-era theory about human temperament that we’d rather not discuss at breakfast.

 

Brandy — A 16th-century Dutch shipmaster was concentrating wine to reduce shipping bulk, planning to add water back at destination. Forgot. The concentrated wine tasted extraordinary. He called it brandewijn — burnt wine. The accident that launched an entire category of fine spirits, connoisseurship, and a thousand pretentious tasting notes.

 

Coca-Cola– A pharmacist wanted a headache tonic. Accidentally mixed carbonated water with syrup. Oops. Became the world’s most famous soft drink. No headache cured. Thirst invented.

 

Teflon — Roy Plunkett in 1938 opened a cylinder of refrigerant gas he’d been experimenting with. Nothing came out — seemingly empty. Curiosity made him cut the cylinder open instead of discarding it. The gas had polymerized into a white waxy solid coating the inside. Spectacularly slippery. Chemically inert. Completely useless for refrigerators. Absolutely perfect for every pan your scrambled eggs have never stuck to since.

 

Microwave Ovens — Percy Spencer was testing radar magnetrons for Raytheon in 1945. Walked past the active equipment. Noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Most people would’ve been annoyed about the chocolate. Spencer was curious about why. Stuck popcorn kernels in front of the magnetron next. Then an egg (which exploded, because of course it did). Six months later: the first commercial microwave. Born from a melted Hershey bar and a man who asked the right question about his ruined snack.

 

The pattern that emerges when you line them up is almost comedic in its consistency: the discoverer and the dismisser were standing in the exact same spot. One filed it under anomaly. The other filed it under announcement.

 

To Note: Side effects are not bugs. They’re beta releases of the future.

 

What if we flipped the script?

  • Treat anomalies like VIP guests. When something behaves oddly, don’t fix it. Follow it.
  • Run “side-effect sprints.” Allocate time to explore outcomes you didn’t plan for. Curiosity with a calendar.
  • Reward accidents. Not just outcomes. Build cultures where “I found this weird thing” gets applause, not eye-rolls.
  • Document serendipity. Most teams track KPIs. Few track “WTFs.” That’s where the gold hides.
  • Ask a better question: not “Did it work?” but “What else did it do?”

 

Because the next Viagra is currently being dismissed as a distraction.
The next Post-it is being labelled “not scalable.”
The next mouse is sitting in a metaphorical butter dish, waiting to be noticed.

 

We don’t need more control. We need better curiosity.
And the courage to admit that sometimes, the plan is just the decoy.

 

Side effects don’t derail progress. They are progress—wearing a disguise.

 

Ditch the sell-by-date dogma. Side effects are your rebel R&D lab—embrace the chaos, or stay chained.

 

Provoke Point: What “side effect” in your life is screaming blockbuster?

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

Suresh Dinakaran | Chief Storyteller | ISD Global

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