.
urgent optimism when they believe victory is just around the corner.
But even after you overcome your initial fear of failure and gain creative confidence, you need to continue stretching yourself. Like a muscle, your creative abilities will grow and strengthen with practice. Continuing to exercise them will keep them in shape. All innovators need to make creative leaps: What need should you focus on? Which idea do you go with? What should you prototype? That is where experience and intuition come in.
Diego Rodriguez in his blog Metacool says that innovation thinkers often use “informed intuition” to identify a great insight, a key need, or a core feature. In other words, relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices. When it comes to bringing new stuff into the world, Diego argues that the number of product cycles you’ve gone through (what he calls “mileage”) trumps the number of years of experience. A twenty-year veteran of the auto industry who works several years on each new vehicle before it goes to market might have experienced far fewer cycles than a software developer working just two years on mobile apps that ship every couple of months. Once you have gone through enough rapid innovation cycles, you will gain familiarity with process and confidence in your ability to assess new ideas. And that confidence results in reduced anxiety in the face of ambiguity when you are bringing new ideas into the world.
PERMISSION TO FAIL
Whether you consider yourself a “born innovator” or are new to creative confidence, you can get better faster at coming up with new ideas if you give yourself and those around you the leeway to make mistakes from time to time. Permission to fail comes more easily in some settings than others. Venture capitalist Randy Komisar says that what distinguishes pockets of entrepreneurship like Silicon Valley is not their successes but the way they deal with failure. In cultures that encourage entrepreneurs, there is a greater appreciation and understanding of what Komisar calls “constructive failure.”
Fear of risk and failure was a central theme when IDEO worked with German entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs on reinventing European venture capital. Research with software developers in the United States and Europe showed that the transition from a stable corporate job to the uncertainty of an early startup was one of the scariest moments in the evolution of a new venture. Many never managed to take that leap of faith. For lots of fledgling entrepreneurs, leaving the comfort and security of a salaried job stopped them in their tracks. So we structured the offering for Hinrichs’s new early-stage investment company, HackFWD, to make that transition less intimidating. We helped give entrepreneurs a support network and resources so they could focus their efforts on what they do best. As part of HackFWD’s “Geek Agreement”—published on the firm’s website—entrepreneurs are paid roughly their current salary for a year as they push their concept toward the beta stage and one step closer to market and profitability. They also get connected to a network of experienced advisors. Quitting your day job remains a scary step, but maintaining your current income for a year makes it easier to pursue new-to-the-world ideas.
Within large companies, CEOs and executives have started to make similar efforts to reduce perceived risks and show their commitment to innovation initiatives. For example, VF Corporation—the world’s largest apparel company and owner of dozens of familiar brands ranging from Nautica to The North Face—started an internal innovation fund a few years ago. Overseen by vice president of strategy and innovation Stephen Dull, the fund helps bootstrap innovative ideas at their earliest stages. It allows business unit managers to take entrepreneurial risks while meeting all the performance targets with their current product offerings. One successful innovation fund program explored whether VF’s Wrangler brand, historically popular with cowboys in the American West, could be translated to appeal to motorcycle riders in India. The result was a line of jeans with features like water-repellent fabric that appeal to India’s highly mobile youth market. To date, VF’s innovation fund has sponsored more than ninety-seven such innovative ventures around the world.
We all need the latitude to try out new ideas. Look for ways to grant yourself creative license, or give yourself the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Label your next new idea an experiment, and let everyone know that you are just testing it out. Lower others’ expectations, so that failure can lead to learning without career damage.
EMBRACE YOUR FAILURES
An old proverb reminds us that “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” To learn from failure, however, you have to “own” it. You have to figure out what went wrong and what to do better next time. If you don’t, you’re liable to repeat your errors in the future.
Acknowledging mistakes is also important for moving on. In doing so, you not only sidestep the psychological pitfalls of cover-up, rationalization, and guilt; you may also find that you enhance your own brand through your honesty, candor, and humility.
Ask financial services professionals about their recent performance, and you are likely to hear a lot of “spin,” as they either ignore their losses or cloud them with phrases like “market corrections” or “industry downdrafts.” Nonetheless, one of our favorite examples of a company owning its failures comes from financial services. Bessemer Venture Partners is a well-respected, hundred-year-old venture capital firm that has gotten in on the ground floor of some stellar growth companies. Their website predictably features their “Top Exits.” What’s refreshing and not so predictable is that one click away from these mega-successes is a catalog of miscues and failed foresight Bessemer calls their “Anti-Portfolio.” As Bessemer explains, their “long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.” One of their partners passed over a chance to invest in the Series A round of PayPal, which sold a few years later for $1.5 billion. The firm also passed—seven times—on the chance to invest in FedEx, currently worth over $30 billion.
One of the firm’s strongest advocates for the “Anti-Portfolio” idea, partner David Cowan, plays a starring role in its stories of missed opportunities and failures. A former neighbor of Tom’s, Cowan lived within walking distance from the Silicon Valley garage where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google. Cowan was good friends with the woman who rented them the garage, and she tried to introduce him one day to these “two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Cowan’s response: “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
Bessemer’s Anti-Portfolio is part of a trend among enlightened individuals and organizations who want to shine a bright light on their mistakes and learn from that dispassionate observation. The Forbes Midas List ranks Cowan among the top venture capitalists in the world for turning startup investments into gold. Could owning up to his failures have cleared the path for his out-sized success?
Look around, and you will see other signs of this shift in thinking. Failure conferences are cropping up in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Author and educator Tina Seelig asks her students to write a “failure résumé” that highlights their biggest defeats and screw-ups. She says that smart people accustomed to promoting their successes find it very challenging. In the process of compiling their failure résumé, however, they come to own their setbacks, both emotionally and intellectually.
“Viewing their experiences through the lens of failure forces them to come to terms with the mistakes they have made along the way,” Tina writes in her book What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. She is brave enough to include her own failure résumé, pointing out missteps such as not paying attention to company culture early in her career and avoiding conflicts in personal relationships. Now more aware and open about her early shortcomings, Tina is not held back by them. She’s the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, nurturing tomorrow’s entrepreneurial leaders.
THE CLAY HORSE
Our fear of being judged is something we learn at a young age. But we don’t start out with it. Most children are naturally daring. They explore new games, meet new people,