By Eben van Tonder, 13 March 25

Introduction

For years, I thought of mistakes as something to avoid at all costs. A misstep was something you corrected quickly and moved on from, as quietly as possible. But over time, I’ve come to see things differently. Often, it’s the mistakes—the choices that didn’t turn out how I’d planned—that offered the greatest return in terms of clarity, strength, and future success.

Mark Travers (2025) recently discussed the concept of cognitive variability—the restless, unpredictable quality in the way we think and make decisions. He suggests this inconsistency isn’t a flaw; it’s how we adapt in uncertain, complex environments. We don’t always take the straightest line to the solution. Sometimes we need to explore, take wrong turns, and make mistakes. This variation in our thinking allows for more robust outcomes.

This concept resonates deeply with my experience, both personally and professionally.

When a Mistake Becomes a Breakthrough

One afternoon in the factory, Trevor and I were running multiple sausage formulations. We were balancing different functional ingredients and fine-tuning recipes when Trevor accidentally added 35 times more of one ingredient than was specified. You’d think that would ruin the batch—and under normal circumstances, maybe it would have. But it didn’t. What it did was reveal something we hadn’t fully appreciated before: the true power of that functional ingredient to firm up and stabilize the mixture.

What looked like a mistake became a breakthrough. It fundamentally changed my understanding of that functional’s behavior. We discovered new possibilities for formulation design, especially in terms of firmness and yield. Without that error, we might have continued operating within our old assumptions. It’s an example of what Travers (2025) refers to as productive variability—the kind of deviation from the expected path that leads to innovation.

The Value in the Wrong Partnerships

I’ve experienced similar lessons outside of product development. Over the years, I’ve worked with business partners who were, in hindsight, not the right fit for long-term collaboration. At the time, those partnerships seemed like miscalculations. But looking back, I can see they were not failures. They provided me with resources that allowed me to achieve critical personal goals—like putting my children through school—and they taught me invaluable lessons about leadership, trust, and strategic clarity.

Even in personal relationships, though I will speak about them only in broad terms, I can say there were experiences that, while not lasting, brought joy and important self-understanding. Those partnerships taught me about my own priorities and values in life. As Travers (2025) highlights, variability and adaptability are key. Nothing is wasted if we integrate the learning.

Mistakes as Tools for Mapping the Terrain

Every mistake—whether it was Trevor’s overdose on an ingredient or my own choices in partnerships—became a map of the terrain. Through these experiences, I came to understand the boundaries of the systems I was operating in: how far an ingredient could be pushed before it compromised the structure of a sausage, and how far I could push a business arrangement before the integrity of the partnership was at risk.

This mirrors Travers’ (2025) point that cognitive noise—the mental randomness we often perceive as chaos—is not a malfunction, but a feature that allows for flexible problem-solving. Our brains, and by extension our organizations, are not built to function like perfect machines. They need variability to thrive.

Adaptability as the Superpower

In the end, it is not the mistakes that hold us back. It is our resistance to adapting and learning from them. Mistakes, when reframed, give us the information and perspective we need to build better systems, make smarter decisions, and design more productive partnerships.

Travers (2025) emphasizes that we should stop striving for perfection and embrace the variability of human thought as a strength. In my world, both on the factory floor and in broader life decisions, this philosophy has proven true. Trevor’s mistake didn’t slow us down—it accelerated our understanding. Past partnerships that didn’t work out didn’t break me—they sharpened my vision.

What might look like failure in the moment often turns out to be variability at work. With better clarity, better tools, and deeper understanding, we can use these experiences to build structures that last.

Turning Mistakes into Foundations for Superpowered Thinking

Building on Travers’ framework and reflecting on Trevor’s experience, as well as my own, here are practical strategies for harnessing cognitive variability and transforming mistakes into strengths:

1. Reframe the Mistake as Data
   Every error provides new information. Trevor’s accidental overdose offered insights we wouldn’t have uncovered in a standard trial (Travers, 2025).
2. Pause Before Reacting
   Don’t rush to fix or erase a mistake. Evaluate it. Sometimes, as we found, you stand on the edge of a valuable discovery (Baird et al., 2012).
3. Foster an Environment Where Mistakes Lead to Exploration
   Create space where people can own and explore errors without fear of blame. This leads to innovation rather than shutdown (Miller & Cohen, 2001).
4. Use Productive Distractions Intentionally
   Stepping away from a problem can lead to better answers. Travers (2025) calls this the incubation effect, and studies confirm that disengaging from intense focus allows the brain to make new connections (Sio & Ormerod, 2009).
5. Document and Debrief
   After each mistake, capture the lessons learned. Trevor’s error led to documented benchmarks we now use as reference points.
6. Trust Experience-Sharpened Intuition
   Mistakes sharpen your intuitive judgment over time. Trevor now has a more refined sense of balance for that functional, informed by direct experience (Bault et al., 2011).
7. Balance Flexibility with Structure
   Not all decisions benefit from open-ended exploration. Some situations require structured frameworks—especially in high-stakes contexts like finance or healthcare (Mehta et al., 2012). Knowing when to be flexible and when to be precise is part of the mastery.

References

Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446024

Bault, N., Joffily, M., Rustichini, A., & Coricelli, G. (2011). Medial prefrontal cortex and striatum mediate the influence of social comparison on the decision process. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(38), 16044–16049. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1100892108

Guevara Erra, R., Pérez Velázquez, J. L., & Rosenblum, M. (2019). The signature of consciousness in brain dynamics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(4), 1059–1064. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900872116

Mehta, R., Zhu, R. (Juliet), & Cheema, A. (2012). Is noise always bad? Exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 784–799. https://doi.org/10.1086/665048

Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167–202. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.167

Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014212

Travers, M. (2025, March 11). Why a ‘Productively Distracted’ Brain Is a Superpower—By a Psychologist. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2025/03/11/why-a-productively-distracted-brain-is-a-superpower-by-a-psychologist