My colleague Matt Germonprez recently hit me and around 50 other people at CHAOSScon North America (2018) with this observation:
“A lot of times we get really great answers to the wrong questions.”
Matt explained this phenomena as “type III error”, an allusion to the more well known statistical phenomena of type I and type II errors. If you are trying to solve a problem or improve a situation, sometimes great answers to the wrong questions can still be useful because in all likelihood somebody is looking for the answer to that question! Or maybe it answers another curiosity you were not even thinking about. I think we should call this (Erdelez, 1997). There’s an old adage:
“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.”