Series: Building Your Creative Practice @ Work
Part 5: Failing your way to success as fast as you can
This is the 5th and final part in our series Building Your Creative Practice @ Work. Haven’t read Parts 1 - 4 yet?
The original idea behind this series of posts was to give people practical tips for building up their creative practice at work. By “creative practice,” we mean any intentional way of working that supports your creative identity and expression.
This last piece of advice is about recontextualizing a common business maxim as a vector of creativity and a cornerstone of a healthy creative practice: fail fast.
Why fail fast?
This idea is so entrancing because it’s apparently counterintuitive; nobody wants to fail, and if you do end up failing—whether that’s as a project, in your career, or as a company—you certainly don’t want it to happen right away!
But, as Sunnie Giles writing in Forbes explains, failing fast is a smart strategy because today’s systems are so complex that it’s almost impossible to predict what will or won’t be successful from the outset. Therefore, the best way forward is to learn what not to do as quickly as possible and incorporate what you learn into the next iteration.
“…people are used to a culture that doesn’t tolerate failure, but failure is an essential ingredient for radical innovation. We need to encourage others to fail fast and safely. Then we need to glean lessons learned and disseminate the learning throughout the team as soon as possible.”
But what does this have to do with creativity? As we explored in our post on the importance of play for creativity, curating for yourself (and/or your team) an environment or even just blocks of time wherein there are no wrong answers and you can take big, unserious swings is key. This creates a sense of safety from which actual innovation can blossom. We hold back when we fear judgment. We play it safe when we fear failure.
By neutralizing failure by incorporating it into the process of getting to success, you’re better able to tap into the levity needed for play, exploration, and true creativity.
Failing is easier said than done
“Fail fast, people!” is one of those things I imagine an insufferable tech bro founder yelling at an all-hands meeting while wearing a $300 tee-shirt. Or a Patagonia vest. Or a Patagonia vest over a $300 tee-shirt.
In my tech career, the idea of fast failure was often softened to a way less explicit exhortation about “constant iteration” or “rapid experimentation,” taking the specter of failure right out of the equation. But even with these softer hedges, “fail fast” was usually given as a directive in a context where it wasn’t actually possible to fail fast—nor acceptable to fail at all.
First of all, there was never any time to fail and iterate before whatever the project was had to be done. (Never mind that this perhaps makes it less likely to achieve the goal in the end!) Secondly, there was rarely a strong enough feeling of psychological safety, which meant that the prospect of failing—even when it was supposedly “ok” to do so—always felt dicey in reality. And finally, there was almost always a mismatch between the creative ambitions of the project and metrics we were being measured by. (Anyone relate?)
And this is a huge shame, because an iterative, collaborative approach is genuinely one of the best ways to meet a high bar of creative excellence! Failing fast is good advice!
So here are some ground rules for creating an environment where you can “fail fast,” because it’s not usually clear that everyone has the same idea of what failure is, what fast is, and what they’re actually asking for!
1. Get on the same page
I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve presented some work (or had work presented to me), and at the end of the presentation, instead of applause and questions, a critical stakeholder goes, “But I thought the goal was [something completely different than what was just presented].”
If you’ve felt this particular brand of professional pain, you know how acute it is.
Failing fast isn’t possible without first eliminating the possibility of the scenario I just described. But how to make that happen?
Build the (psychologically safe) world
Ok, so this is pretty good advice for…everything. Rarely is there a time you don’t want psychological safety. But we’re referring to this step as world building in the same way that people talk about sci-fi and fantasy authors engaging in world building. This means that the rules of the world are clear and the world behaves in expected ways, or else the audience will be pissed. And rightfully so!
Round up your stakeholders and any and all people who could possibly complain about your project, and establish the “rules of the world.” Explain the iterative process you want to undertake, decide how long you will need, including experimentation time when there may be no positive results, and agree on a budget that includes the time and/or resources needed to experiment with no positive results. To be clear, there will be results. You will be learning. But you may not be achieving the goal. Yet!
This gives everyone the air cover they need to actually let go and experiment and try things that legitimately might not work in service of the greater goal.
If you don’t get a chance to build this world with your stakeholders, choose a different approach! Go with something “safer.” Seriously. Maybe that’s frontloading the failure into the ideation stage with just the executors, or building in time for just one bet/experiment rather than a continuous culture of iteration.
Set clear objectives & metrics
Often, creative excellence and innovation have little to nothing to do with click-through rates or lead capture or pipeline generation or the things you’ll actually be assessed on and, in these increasingly lean times, laid off for not achieving! The best, most exciting, most head-turning ideas might not actually make you the most money in the short term. (Notice I said short term!) By setting clear objectives and metrics in the world-building phase of failing fast, you ensure that you aren’t iterating your way toward something amazing that isn’t actually hitting the brief.
My advice? Be suspicious and critical of what non-executional stakeholders bring to the table as inspiration for the project. And honestly, this is a good sense check for yourself, as well! Understandably, we gravitate toward the most exciting, most head-turning ideas on the market for inspiration, but, also understandably, we lack the transparency to know how that idea really performed and against what metrics. A super creative, narrative microsite experience or boundary-breaking new feature might win a bunch of awards or generate PR buzz…but did it actually result in a 30% increase in [your metric here]? Or are we just trying to mash our actual goal onto something we think is cool?
2. Go wide before you go deep
In the early planning or brainstorming phases, force yourself to keep coming up with “bad” ideas even when you feel like you’ve finally got something good or have already identified several solid directions.
We have an understandable tendency to hit on a good idea and then chase it down, expending significant time and energy in the process. And while that idea might indeed be great, by investing in the first (or second, or third) great idea means that the seventh great idea never exists at all. Yes, the idea behind failing fast is to try to exhaust a nonviable solution as quickly as possible, but when we overcommit to one too soon, we might grow attached and not be willing to let it fail when it should! Going wide and having lots of good ideas first makes the possibility of losing one on the table less painful and lowers the stakes if the first one doesn’t work out.
3. Implement rapid feedback loops
This is a tricky one, as certain stakeholders have different levels of comfort with sketches and abstraction. It can be really challenging to make up for a stakeholder’s lack of imagination when asking for feedback on something unpolished. Again, this is where some world building comes in. Set clear expectations of what stakeholders are reacting to, frame the conversation with your current priorities, and don’t be afraid to give instructions like “Please only react to the visual directions and not the copy.” or “Please disregard the color choices and react only to the content.”
Calling everything a “prototype” or a “test” and always presenting multiple directions is a great way to get feedback when you need it without the stakeholder freaking out because they think they’re looking at something near completion.
Over to you…
Failing fast can be super beneficial to increasing creativity, but it’s not actually an easy way to work without the proper supports in place. Hopefully the ideas here will give you the courage to try an iterative, rapid prototyping approach to a project in the near future!
Feel free to tell us about how you’ve successfully failed fast in the comments!
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