When 3M was trying to develop a new, strong adhesive, someone made a mistake and produced a glue that was less adhesive than usual. When you stuck things together with it, they just peeled apart. So was that a useless, hopeless, idiotic mistake? No, it was the origin of the Post-it® Note.

Alexander Fleming was having trouble cultivating bacteria in a petri dish because a particular mould had a habit of growing alongside the bacteria and destroying them. A frustrating mistake that kept ruining his experiments? Nope – when he decided to study the ‘mistake’ more closely, the mould turned out to have a use after all. He called it penicillin.

One of the biggest bars to being creative is that we’re afraid to make mistakes. Actually there are no rights and wrongs in creative thinking, but we’ve all been brought up to ‘get things right’ and not ‘make mistakes’. Remember the teacher handing back your work in class and giving you a low mark because of the errors you made? It’s ingrained in our culture to see mistakes as a Bad Thing and to strive to avoid them in all fields of life.

This is the enemy of creative thinking. It’s the worry that we’ll get it wrong, mess up, make a mistake, that keeps us from experimenting and letting go to our creativity. Alexander Fleming wasn’t the only scientist cultivating bacteria in the 1920s. Lots of them made the same ‘mistake’ and did what they’d always been told to do with mistakes – throw them away, cover them up, get rid of them and start again. I can’t tell you those scientists’ names though, because none of them discovered penicillin.

When an inventor develops a new product, they go through countless development stages and prototypes. Sometimes, there may be tens or even hundreds of versions of a product before the one that finally goes to market. So why don’t they just start selling the very first prototype they make? It’s because it doesn’t work properly. In fact it may not work at all. But does that make it a mistake? Of course not – it’s just a necessary step on the way to creating a successful product. If those inventors believed that their early mistakes represented some kind of failure, and they should abandon the product as a result, we’d have no cars, mobile phones, sewing machines, lawn mowers, photocopiers.

A mistake is telling you something, sure, and it’s a good idea to listen to it. But it’s not telling you that you’re a failure. It’s telling you that that you’ve identified a barrier to success, and all you need to do is overcome or circumvent each barrier and you’ll succeed.

What’s more, every barrier forces you to think creatively to find a solution, which means you’ll have poured more originality and imagination into the project than you would have done without any ‘mistakes’, and that can only be a good thing. We’ll come onto problem solving in more detail later. For now, the message is to embrace mistakes and not to shy away from the risk of them.