Creativity is not a solo genius game we often imagine it to be.

Really at the heart of great creativity is a partnership of two skillsets, "visionary and imaginative" AND the other "rigor, process, and execution.". Often these roles are not performed by the same person or department. But, getting all these steps to work together hand-in-hand is fundamentally important to have a great idea that will change the game.

Often, it's cool and sexy to talk only about the visionary and imaginative part of creativity while ignoring the rigor fundamental to its success. This often manifests in the way that we think about innovation, and we talk about creativity in creating new products, new services, and new systems, which is, we focus very much on having this wonderous, great idea, so much so, we say things like "well we accept failure is possible." "We are shooting for the moon," "we are creating something they don't know they want yet," the famous Steve Jobs quote that talks about consumers don't know what they want until you show them what it looks like. That can be a very influential way to talk about creativity, but it can also be very dangerous because it implies that a great idea is 90% of the solution. When in reality, a great idea is 10% of the solution, and 90% is about execution. And that's something Steve Jobs recognized and talked about at length and is something worth looking out for and reading about.

And only by applying rigor with creativity can we build a model that allows us not to accept that failure is fine because it isn't. It's costly, time-consuming, and demoralizing. But learning is what we're focusing on. If through failure, through perfect and flawless execution, and to the best of our intentions, we still fail, but we learn from our failures so we can do better next time, that's the art of marrying these great ideas and this great execution, and if you build the right system that embraces both sides of that necessary process, then you should never truly fail and learn from every process and create an environment that doesn't demoralize people when things don't go right, but helps people understand why this great idea didn't manifest the way we had hoped in real life and importantly how are we going to fix that next time.

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