Failure, Beans and Counting

I recently clicked on an online query from a Linkedin subscriber, asking the question; "What were your biggest failures?" I thought about that. For a while. I asked myself the question again, and then tried to make a separation between my effort, team effort, and institutional effort. Then I thought: "What do you mean by "failure?" Your guess was as good as mine. But at the end of the day, "failure" is a highly relative noun. When you fail to show up to jury duty, yeah, that's a fail. When you forget an appointment with a very important client, that's failing to do your job on their behalf. When you forget your wedding anniversary, well, that's pretty much a no-brainer.

But when it comes to failure as a part of the creative process, it gets more interesting. In that context, I'm claiming out loud that the word "failure" is a good thing. If you care about what you're doing as a designer, it means that you're putting it out there. It means that you're fearless, and it means that you're simply trying things out for size toward a greater good. The creative process involves a high degree of iteration. A high degree of protected iteration, in search of doing things that add up to a different, and better result is sometimes lost on the bean counters. You know, the "measurability folks (risk assessors, accountants, and operations officers)."

Failure, in a different context could also mean succeeding at trying, hundreds, if not thousands of times, to do something new that hasn't yet been discovered. Thomas Edison might agree, because his whole life was dedicated to a dogged iteration process, in the spirit of discovery, learning, proving and perfection. His results speak for themselves, as do others from visionary companies who have changes our lives.

Without failure, innovation is impossible. History proves that out. The bean counters have always hated failure. They hate that word because it's counterintuitive to "predictable measures of success." To them, failure is an affront to the human desire to "certainly" win. But I argue that the risk of failure is essential to human progress, innovation and business success. Why? Because for every major innovation in human progress, it took exhaustive levels of failed attempts to get to the end results that moved the needle; that changed things forever. The pressure for success was no doubt fueled by investors who demanded results, who also misunderstood the need to fail first in order to find incremental success. It took a leap of faith to move forward. Phil Knight once said, "It's really risky to not take risks."

That leap is what I'm talking about. Innovation takes space. That space demands trust, it demands resources, it demands patience, and above all, it demands faith – Faith in the people charged with forging a new path, faith in the mission that's been tasked, and faith in a commitment to just give the team a period of time to prove progress. Unfortunately, the "beans" take time to count. Yeah, it sucks that innovation doesn't turn on a dime. But in retrospect, positive results HAVE happened when a healthy understanding of how failure factors into the equation of progress. Steve Jobs understood that, Thomas Edison understood that, and hopefully, more of the bean counters in today's obsession with instant results might as well.

Designers aren't normal people. At all. We are curious. We are cynical. We question everything. And yes, we want to succeed and do great things. But we also know that it takes time, intense effort, and a passionate desire to do good work, along with some reasonable space to fail. We also know that our work isn't a formulaic, fact-based endeavor. Creativity lives in the seams of what hasn't been done before. As designers, we are charged with finding a great fit between genuine need and the answers to those needs within those seams. We deserve some space to fail when necessary. Everyone has been and will be better off when we have it. The bean counters won't be disappointed when we do, and neither will the people that we serve.