Embrace Failure to Invite Success

​To promote a culture of creativity and innovation you must get comfortable with Failure.
Put a positive spin on it. Failure is an inevitable side-effect in any business culture that promotes new ideas and innovative ways of working.
In Dan Pallotta’s Ted Talk, he famously states, “when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation”.
You simply can’t have innovation without embracing mistakes that will happen. You have to take the good with the learnings.

​Some very well-known brands are the result of learnings from prior failures. Now they are called Innovations!
 
The list is endless but some game changers include, 

antibiotics, the light bulb, Dyson vacuum cleaners, Post-It notes, the Jacuzzi, WD-40 and Viagra which was initially designed to help cure chest pain.
Innovation does not need to be on a world changing scale. Your business may find innovative solutions to your client's issues. This may not make a ripple of global impact but have a mammoth impact for your client.

How can you embrace failure and promote innovation in your business?

• Ask the audience – If your team or your clients have a problem that you are not sure how to solve, ask the wider business. Someone in a completely different area may have just the solution. Or part of the solution to the problem that can be tweaked.​

• Have an ideas repository – at a previous company I worked for there was a MAGIC box (Make A Good Idea Count) link on the Company intranet. People could send in their innovative ideas to solve problems they encountered in their day to day work life. A great way to present solutions to problems that may not make it on the radar of the senior managers. It can be an anonymous repository (if elected) which provides an environment free from judgement.

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• Promote an environment where people feel safe to creatively contribute – Not every idea will be a winner. Don’t allow perfectionism to get in the way of creativity. Some ideas will be tried and will fail. Continue to be comfortable with failure and embrace out-of-the-box thinking. Don’t allow a culture creep where people’s fear of failure and negative ramifications halt the process. One day you might get the innovation you need to solve something drastic.

 

• Embrace the risk, learn & move on – No innovation is ever guaranteed to succeed. Take the learnings from any failures and use them to get ahead of the curve. Move on quickly from the failures and don’t let it hang around the office like the smell of an over-ripe banana. Move on - the next one may be the hole in one.

Encourage innovation by embracing failure in your business. Your People will have confidence that you will back them and that will lead to an empowered workforce. 

​Keep the creativity channels flowing.

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