Fail to fail
How to look at your studio critically, as a business
When I first became Creative Director at A Hundred Monkeys, I had no idea what I was doing. I felt confident in my creative abilities but I had zero experience managing people or a business. Motivated primarily by a fear of failure, I did everything I could to learn about running a creative studio. I read books, listened to podcasts, went to conferences. I was determined to turn this weakness into a strength. Along the way, in seeking to avoid failure, I’ve changed how I think about it.
The word “failure” has a really good PR team.
With all the talk of “Fail Early, Fail Often,” “Failing Forward,” and “Failing Fast”, you get the impression that having your business implode is somehow a good thing — a badge to be acquired on the path to success. But there’s something hiding in these statements that’s actually quite insidious. They’re all about reaching the point of collapse, and then growing from the experience. As if seeing the warning signs and doing something about it somehow deprives you of the transformational power of failure.
The focus is in the wrong place. Talk of failure needs to be shifted into the present tense when you can actually do something about it. It’s great that some of the societal stigma around failure has been relaxed but that doesn’t make it a precursor to nirvana. It’s much more mundane than that. Functionally, failure is simply the admission that something isn’t working. As simple as this might sound, it’s really difficult for some people to admit — particularly those who run businesses. The longer you ignore these issues and pretend they don’t exist or don’t matter, the more lethal they become. These lessons are particularly poignant for designers and studios because with most creative endeavors business is seen as a hindrance — something you need to put up with in order to do the stuff you actually care about. Do design studios fail because their creative output isn’t good enough? Doubt it. Even world-renowned studios have their work heckled regularly. Do they fail because they don’t attend to the ever-evolving business realities of running a studio? Much more likely.
So what does failure look like to a creative studio? Well, for starters, failing means you have an objective. Without one, there’s no way to know if you fail. Also, much more importantly, you will have no idea if you succeed. So write it down. Commit to a clear goal for your business. It could be as simple as being profitable every quarter or building a reliable stable of clients.
What does success mean to you? Because without knowing that, you have no business defining failure.
Now that we’re clear on that, ask yourself: what are you failing at right now? I’m not talking about a presentation that went poorly or a project that you didn’t get. What are the biggest impediments to success as you’ve defined it? What do you waste time on? Designers are good at being critical–some are even better at being self-critical. Put those skills to use. Make a list: what parts of work are you bad at? Where are you failing? It could be hiring or cashflow or building partnerships or contracts or delegation.
Then you’re going to split this list into two parts.
1. Things that I want to get better at
2. Things that I want help with
If you’re having trouble separating the two, ask yourself how heavy these tasks feel. Does it feel like something you could improve at with a few good resources, or does it feel like a monumental undertaking? Sure, you could spend the time to become a bookkeeper, but this is a massive task and almost certainly not worth your time. You’re a designer for a reason. Now start to work your way down your list point by point. Don’t try to do everything at once. Focus on one thing at a time. Once you feel like you have it under control or have found the help you need, take some pride in crossing it off the list. You and your studio are better off for it.
Does this mean you’ll never fail? Of course not. If success is guaranteed how worthy is your objective? If you do end up failing it just means you will fail further down the road, at something more complex, leaving you with a more useful lesson. Failure forces you to examine everything, or at least make some difficult changes. Taking a more reflexive approach, addressing vulnerabilities day in day out, allows you to transform slowly over time. Dramatic changes make failure feel worth it but you can still have that same change, without the drama, stress, and firings. So dig into the difficult, the mishaps, the disarray. You’ll find it’s much easier to get better every day.
This story originally appeared in Backstage Talks №4
