An Excerpt from Creative Confidence by Tom & David Kelley of IDEO
I'll admit it, it's really hard for me to deal with screwing up. I've been that way since I was kid. My third grade teacher even sent me to the school counselor because I'd freak out whenever I earned a grade I thought was less than perfect. Luckily, I'm not quite so tightly wound these days. But I still need to be reminded that there's merit in totally blowing it, especially from expert designers who give TED talks on creativity.
The brothers behind the iconic human centered design firm IDEO, Tom and David Kelley, recently wrote an excellent book that repeatedly hammers the importance of failure home. Their inspirational read, Creative Confidence, shows the many ways we block ourselves from doing something awesome because we're too scared of getting judged. These two have plenty of examples from their own lives and from their employees and students (David Kelley created Stanford's d.school). They advocate for lots of little trails and errors so you get so used to mistakes you stop condemning yourself for making them. Creative Confidence is a great source for unlocking mental road blocks beyond the design world – I found myself recommending it to friends as a way to approach dating, job searches, and any other place where you're best served by using your imagination.
IDEO has been kind enough to offer us an except from Creative Confidence, which I'm excited to share. The passage below is from the chapter "Designing For Courage." - Jennifer Maerz
Designing For Courage
Albert Bandura used the process of guided mastery—a series of small successes—to help people gain courage and overcome deep-seated phobias. What would have been nearly impossible to accomplish in one giant leap became manageable in small steps, with the guidance of someone knowledgeable in the field. In a similar way, we use a step-by-step progression to help people discover and experience the tools and methodologies of design thinking, gradually increasing the level of challenge to help individuals transcend the fear of failure that blocks their best ideas. These small successes are intrinsically rewarding and help people to go on to the next level.
In our classes and workshops, we first ask people to work through quick design challenges, whether it’s to redesign the gift-giving experience or to rethink their daily commute. We may jump in with some help or a small nudge, but mostly we let them figure out solutions themselves. Building confidence through experience encourages more creative action in the future, which further bolsters confidence. For this reason, we frequently ask students and team members to complete multiple quick design projects rather than one big project, to maximize the number of learning cycles.
At the d.school, one of the goals of getting people to work together on a project is to help them practice new skills and challenge themselves—and most likely experience failure as a result. We believe the lessons learned from failures may make us smarter—even stronger. But that doesn’t make failure any more fun. So most of us naturally try to avoid failure at all costs. Failure is hard, even painful. As Stanford professor Bob Sutton and IDEO partner Diego Rodriguez often say at the d.school, “Failure sucks, but instructs.”
The inescapable link between failure and innovation is a lesson you can learn only through doing.We give students a chance to fail as soon as possible, in order to maximize the learning time that follows. Instead of long lectures followed by exercises, most of our classes at the d.school give students a little instruction up front and then get them working on a project or a challenge. We follow up in debriefs to reflect on what succeeded—and what can be learned from things that didn’t work.
“Many d.school classes demand that student teams keep pushing the limits of possibility until they face-plant,” says IDEO partner and consulting associate professor Chris Flink. “The personal resilience, courage, and humility born of a healthy failure form a priceless piece of their education and growth.”
Facing failure in order to wipe away the fear is something understood intuitively by our friend John “Cass” Cassidy, lifelong innovator and creator of Klutz Press. In his book Juggling for the Complete Klutz, Cass didn’t start us out juggling two balls, or even one. He began with something more basic: “The Drop.” Step one is simply to throw all three balls in the air and let them drop. Then repeat. In learning to juggle, the angst comes from failure—from having the ball fall to the floor. So with step one, Cass aims to numb aspiring jugglers to that. Having the ball fall to the floor becomes more normal than the ball not falling to the floor. After we address our fear of failure, juggling becomes a lot easier. The two of us were skeptical at first, but with the help of his simple approach, we really did learn to juggle.
Fear of failure holds us back from learning all sorts of new skills, from taking on risks, and from tackling new challenges. Creative confidence asks that we overcome that fear. You know you are going to drop the ball, make mistakes, and go in a wrong direction or two. But you come to accept that it’s part of learning. And in doing so, you are able to remain confident that you are moving forward despite the setbacks.