Please let me fail: failure, vulnerability and creativity
Here is what I think is stopping many of us from being creative.
When was the last time you felt comfortably naked in front of your colleagues at work? I do everyday. From what I have learned that being able to be so is at the core of any creative process. They told you to be creative, think outside the box, step outside of your comfort zone… but what is out there? Ambiguity and risk, excitement and opportunity.
Creativity is essential to our survival and prosperity as human beings. It is defined as the human capacity to use our imaginations to create solutions for complex problems (Kupers et al. 2018; Welch and McPherson 2012).
It requires courage to be creative. According to the literature, creativity is a process consisting of steps such as problem discovery, preparation, incubation, insight, implementation, and validation (Botella et al. 2018). However, I would argue that there is a vital step missing from this list. Failure.
I’m one of those who believes that failure is an essential part of any creative or innovative process. Chris Hay, in his book Knowledge, Creativity and Failure: A New Pedagogical Framework for Creative Arts, (Hay, 2016) described failure as a “way of knowing” and argued that embracing failure is about “finding one’s way through darkness and coming out […] armed with new knowledge”.
Innovation and creativity require iteration. Iteration is “the process of doing something again and again, usually to improve it”. Which implies that if I get it right, I don’t need to iterate. Hence, I would say, as soon as you think you are right, you’ve killed your creativity. Dr Karl Jeffries — a creativity mentor and coach — told me he would argue that thinking you are right is also a part of the creative process, but the mastery lies in being able to park that and continuing your exploration. “Feeling as sense of rightness in a creative insight isn’t the end of the process” he added.
Externally disempowered to fail
So, if embracing failure is so essential to our creative problem-solving process, what is stopping us?
I believe there are two types of causes: internal and external to oneself. Unsurprisingly these are intertwined as well.
External causes are society driven, the way we were taught that failure comes with negative connotations. Think about how scoring low in most of our educational systems is simply called “fail”; how most parents have raised their kids to avoid “being a failure”; and how social media has backed that thinking.
Think about this for a second. Did you notice the surge of motivational speeches in recent years? and how it was empowered by video-enabled social media?
It was a ‘push’ for more. More wealth, more achievements, more accomplishments, more success… I must say, this boom of motivational speakers and inspirational videos, was mostly with positive and harmless intentions. But suddenly, we all felt expected to be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk. It is the rise of a new culture, one that pushes individuals to aspire for more, to aim higher and to accept nothing less than their ‘dream life’. With every step, your expectations — and those of everyone else — become higher, bigger, and brighter. This could have been great, if only it wasn’t incomplete. It is still a culture in which — when expectations are not met — only you are to blame , you simply didn’t ‘push’ enough.
Internally demotivated to fail
And here comes the other side of the story, the internal causes.
You live in a society whose institutions shame failure, from the educational to the parental ones. You are saturated with a culture that only glorify the small percentage of exceptional achievers and their successes, while you are left alone to deal with the blame of not pushing enough. Yet they still ask you to step outside and be creative.
“Shame isn’t a quiet grey cloud, shame is a drowning man who claws his way on top of you, scratching and tearing your skin, pushing you under the surface.”
KIRSTY EAGER
We tend to internalise all this external pressure, negativity, shame and blame. It engrains inside and becomes a part of our psyche. Research showed that we consistently move through series of experiences shaped by culture and social situations, and that these experiences pile up “forming a sedimentation of culture within individuals”. (Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie, 2015).
How are we expected to allow ourselves and others to embrace failure when it is painted only with shame?
Things have started to change more recently. Lately, we have started hearing more about the importance of failure, with an increase in the popularity of books and podcasts such as How to Fail by Elizabeth Day. This surge is build on wider growing interest in individual mental health. Google searches for “mental wellbeing” have increased by about 350% between 2016–2020.
Vulnerability as fuel for creativity
To embrace failure, we need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. For those who make the slightest link — consciously or not — between vulnerability and fragility or weakness, I would advise reading and watching Dr Brené Brown’s work. Her TED Talk in 2010, The Power of Vulnerability, is one of the top ten most viewed TED talks in the world. Dr Brown spent over a decade researching vulnerability and she calls it a power. And to that, I say Amen!
Vulnerability is not about winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up even when you can’t control the outcome.
Brené Brown
Being vulnerable means daring yourself to face yourself and your surroundings. I see this as the cornerstone of any creative process.
Simply put, for you to be creative you need to be able to fail, and for you to be able to fail you need to be able to overcome the fear and shame that comes with that. And how can you do that if you are not empowered to be vulnerable?
Being vulnerable is not easy and it requires the right environment. While conventional work, school and home environments have often created a stigma and shame around failure, and associated feelings of weakness and flaw with being vulnerable, the right environment is one that empowers people to be vulnerable.
Workplaces are not just for work
Going back to my main question: When was the last time you felt comfortably naked in front of your colleagues at work?
An enabling environment is one where you CAN be naked. A place where you can express your fears and hopes, where talking about your mistakes and vices gets as much as — if not more — celebration as your successes and triumphs. This is the environment that creates the necessary safe zone for you to be vulnerable, to fail and to be creative.
I was lucky enough to be in such an environment when I was asked to establish a brand new DesignOps function; a task filled not just with excitement and opportunity but also risks, ambiguity, and (yeah, you guessed it) potential failures. I needed to be comfortable saying: “I don’t have the answer”, “I don’t know” and “I failed in […] but I’ve learned […]”.
I doubt I would have dared to embark on such a journey without having felt secure and enabled at my workplace. And it has been a life-changing journey so far.
So, let me ask you one more thing.
What are you doing to enable yourself — and empower others — to be vulnerable as leaders, co-workers, teachers, parents and friends?
