If you have to break some eggs…

What’s the difference between an omelette and scrambled eggs? Order. Tidyness. Clear boundaries.

If you try to make an omelette and you screw it up, you can quickly pivot to scrambled eggs: throw in the filling and mash the whole mess around in the pan. Voila! Scrambled eggs. Have you already put the filling on, tried the folding maneuver and it didn’t work? Same thing: apply violence to the omelette and you’ll get scrambled eggs. Nice recovery: treat yourself to a 5th cup of coffee.

Going the other direction is not so easy—impossible, I’d say.

Having a fallback plan that works with an increase in chaos is helpful. If the original plan doesn’t work, there might be something almost as good you can make from the mistake. But it’s important to figure that out ahead of time, because not everything is so easily rescued. (This idea works waaaay better with cooking than with baking, by the way. Baking requires a ridiculous amount of order and structure and should be considered a delicate activity.)

P.S. Some technologies are like this: out of order escalators become stairs (RIP, Mitch Hedberg), dead electric toothbrushes become toothbrushes with giant-assed handles and a broken scissors becomes a matching set of letter openers.