Every time I make fish pie, my family know what’s coming next.
Smoked haddock, fresh salmon, luxuriant Scottish red prawns, white sauce made with a splash of Noilly Prat, a little parsley.
And then the mash.
The mash is the key bit. I use two egg yolks to enrich it, because it gives the top of the pie that golden, soft-but-crisp finish that makes the whole thing feel a bit cheffy.
The only problem is that it leaves two egg whites. And I’m Scottish, and stereotypes holding true, I have to find a way to use them.
So two egg whites, in our house, mean eight financiers, small madeleine-type cakes (pronounced ‘fee-non-syay’).
The batter takes minutes. The financier mould goes in the oven while I’m serving up the pie. By the time we’ve sat down, eaten the fish pie, and had the usual conversation about whether it needs more pepper, the financiers are ready.
Warm, almondy. ridiculously pleased with themselves. Annoyingly, they’re often better received than the main dish.
Baking financiers is not an act of wild invention or creativity. They need precision and obedience to the recipe. Follow the steps, weigh the ingredients, don’t mess about, and you get the result.
But they’ve become the part of the meal everyone enjoys most.
The spare egg whites were never the point of dinner. They were a by-product, a small leftover from the thing I was actually trying to make.
At work, we talk a lot about unintended consequences as if they are always bad. A strategy that makes someone feel upset, a new timetable that causes stress, or a change in a process that created new work no one predicted.
But not every unintended consequence is a potential career-ender.
Some are financiers.
A solo dinner last week. sitting beside the Chao Phraya, should have been just that: a table for one, a good view, maybe a quiet hour with a book or the phone.
Instead, being alone and putting away the phone made conversation easier. Locals leaned over for a chat. Tourists talked about their plans to move to Bangkok. And once, without saying a word, a lovely Dutch-Ukrainian couple paid for dinner without telling me.
That wasn’t in the plan.
Giving two keynotes to the same audience over one weekend sounded, at first, like a slightly ridiculous idea. Surely one would be enough. Surely the second would feel like reheating leftovers.
Instead, the constraint forced a totally fresh take on the topic of brand building, built around seven Provocations from the 400 or so I’ve written. The talk felt more alive than the original plan.
That wasn’t in the brief.
A nine-hour layover in Xiamen could easily have been filed under “travel pain”, a stretch of dead time between long flights, a corridor of fatigue.
Instead, it became a Sunday afternoon in a seaside city with a walk, a change of air, and tea with a stranger who wanted to practise their English.
That wasn’t in the itinerary.
As a consultancy firm, we are primed to judge our success against the thing we set out to do.
Did the plan work?
Did the meeting achieve its objective?
Did the project deliver on time?
Did the workshop produce the expected outcome?
They’re all good questions, but they are not the only questions.
Sometimes the most valuable thing to look out for is the thing that appeared because we designed something else.
A better conversation.
A new framing.
A small ritual.
A surprising connection.
An ounce of joy.
In the heat of the moment, I find that the positive unintended outcomes are easy to miss because they look like side effects to be avoided or outlier blips to be ignored.
When someone lingers after a workshop and says, “That’s the first time we’ve talked honestly as a team” there’s a whole conversation to be had about what they need to build on that feeling even further.
When a group of students use a space in a way no architect imagined there’s something to bring to the next project.
When a parent repeats a phrase from your new mission back to you, in their own words, you could get annoyed that they don’t use the words the committee danced on a pinhead to achieve - or you could celebrate the fact they’ve ‘got it’!
So maybe we all need a new habit in our work. Maybe we shouldn’t just ask “what went to plan?” or “what went wrong?”, but also:
“What unexpectedly went right?
“Where are the financiers?”
And once we spot them, we need to build rituals around them or ask what made them possible.
The good stuff is often hiding in the margins of the planned work.
The meeting that was meant to solve a process problem reveals a trust problem. Good. Now you can work on the real thing.
The strategy session that was meant to create alignment reveals one sentence everyone keeps repeating. Good. That might be a mission trying to get out.
The building project that was meant to improve circulation creates a corner where students suddenly choose to sit, talk, read and stay. Good. That might be the most human part of the whole design.
Look at the leftovers of your decisions with curiosity, not irritation. While some leftovers are waste, some leftovers are eight warm financiers, ready just as everyone thought the meal was over.
But there is one more thing. The financiers only happen because the rest of the ingredients are already there.
The spare egg whites only become something useful because there is ground almond in the cupboard. Sugar. Butter. Flour. A financier tin that hasn’t been shoved so far to the back that no one can be bothered finding it.
The opportunity appears because of the fish pie.
But it becomes a treat because the store cupboard is ready.
That is true of most good unintended consequences.
Being alone beside the Chao Phraya only became a conversation because I was open to talking.
The second keynote only became a new take on brand building because there was enough thinking already stored away to draw on.
The nine-hour layover only became an afternoon in Xiamen because there was a little curiosity left in the tank.
Don’t just notice the financiers. Keep your metaphorical store cupboard stocked with an open mind, a sense of humour, with enough slack in the diary to follow the interesting thread. Keep it topped up with people around you who spot possibilities before you do, with a little more time for projects than you think they need, with the humility to admit that the carefully thought-through plan might not contain the best bits.
Positive unintended consequences rarely arrive fully formed. They arrive as spare egg whites. When they do, you need more than optimism: you need ingredients.
The next time something unexpected happens, pause before you label it a problem. It might well be. But it might also be the thing your community remembers far more profoundly.
Just make sure the almonds, sugar and butter are already in the cupboard.