Every once in a while I will witness, or hear from a student about, a dog doing something that can't be explained by the dog's previous experience or training.
First example.
It's bed time. The owner opens the backdoor and tells the dogs to go outside and potty. Both dogs go outside and eliminate. The first dog, the older dog, is a well trained male adult Portuguese Water Dog. The second dog is about a year old female Standard Poodle, less trained. She calls the dogs inside. The older dog comes in. The Poodle decides to romp and run around, just for the sake of running around. After several times calling her, the owner is irritated. She tells the older dog to "get her". He runs back outside, and literally forces (chases) the Poodle back into the home. We had never trained this dog to do anything of this nature.
Second example.
Adult male Australian Shepherd/ Border collie mix. We had mostly finished the first round of Basic Obedience. The owner also had sheep. As she was loading up the sheep into her vehicle (you can guess the destination), one of them hops out of the vehicle and starts running down the alley. She tells the dog to "get her." The dog takes off, practically tackles the sheep, and drives it all the way back to, and into, the car. We never trained that dog to do that.
Third example.
Past student. Adult female Australian Cattle Dog. "It absolutely amazes me how much my dog understands. She “tells” me when she needs help finding her ball. We just checked my room. I told her to look under the bed and pointed so she got down and peeked underneath the bed, sniffing the whole time. It wasn’t there, so we checked the bathroom. It wasn’t there either so I said, “It must be outside.” She ran to the back door. I let her out and she immediately spotted it, grabbed it and ran back inside." We never formerly worked on this, but this owner has an excellent relationship with her dogs.
I can give other examples, but you get the point. What I can say is that I spend a lot of time helping owners develop a working relationship, and proper communication, with their dogs. I can only guess that this type of work was the necessary condition to cause these incidents. If we were to try and do these things again, let's say as a test, I'm betting that they wouldn't just happen. The owner or dog had an urgent need, the dog picked up on it, they communicated with each other, and boom, the intentions turned into useful but unique responses.
Plan accordingly.
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