Your wrong answer might be a perfect answer to a different question

A small bakery tried to launch a thick sandwich bread, but the dough kept proofing unevenly. Loaves came out flatter than planned. The owner was ready to scrap the idea when a regular asked if they could slice the flatter loaves thin for toast. The team trimmed edges, ran a test at the counter, and paired the slices with a herbed butter. The line grew by ten people, and a new menu item stuck.

A design team at a startup built an onboarding feature that was too slow for live use. It felt like failure until an engineer suggested running it overnight and emailing results by morning. They rewrote the brief, renamed the feature, and quietly tested it with fifty users who didn’t need real‑time feedback. Satisfaction went up, not down. A micro‑anecdote from their retrospective captured the mood: “We built a shovel trying to make a broom, and it turns out we needed a shovel.”

Students can use this too. A senior spent weeks on a data visualization that looked cluttered on a slide but made a great handout. She printed it and asked peers to annotate it during Q&A. Suddenly, her mistake became an interactive part of the talk, and the feedback was richer. She left with a grin and a stack of marked‑up pages.

This is systems thinking in action. Outputs that don’t match one context often match another if you look for the right fit. By labeling the mismatch clearly, you identify the properties you actually created. Opportunity recognition research shows that entrepreneurs often pivot by matching an existing capability to a new customer or use case. Failure becomes raw material for a better question.

Write a one‑sentence reason your attempt missed the target, then list three different contexts or users who might want the thing you actually produced. Choose one, rewrite the problem as a short brief for that audience, and run a tiny test—show it to five people who fit and ask for quick feedback within two days. Treat what you learn as a fork in the road, not a dead end. If one path looks promising, keep walking it this week.