Listening to the backtalk

During my conversations with John Seely Brown he provided an lovely insight into the 'design' mindset from his scientific perspective — as he explained it: 

“how do you listen to the backtalk of the situation? So it’s when things don’t quite work out right, I can’t build this material, this new type of invention, new brand or new material. What you learn from the push back? Something is pushing back at what you want to get done. How do you interpret that? How do you get to the root of that? A tremendous number of major discoveries get made by being able to listen and respond to the backtalk. I think of it like a form of Judo where the whole question is, how do you read the context? How do you work with forces rather than against forces?”