Why Does Success Always Start With failure?

This is another post in a regular series on Creativity, Innovation, Business Leadership & Business Success. If you want to checkout the others hop over to LinkedIn Pulse and look me up.

Today I want to dig a little deeper into the creative process. I also want to ask some serious questions about what Creativity means in practice and look at how it can be harnessed and focused in the workplace; unlocking the potential to innovate and driving forward business growth and prosperity.

The capacity to innovate, create, inspire and think outside the box, has in one form or another been the spark that has fired-up new technologies and launched new business empires for eons. According to a 2010 study by IBM, creativity was found to be the single most important factor for determining future business success & as a more recent study by CIPD discovered, it’s not just about Entrepreneurs doing it for themselves, it’s also about what all the Intrapreneurs are doing who currently work within your business, company or organisation.

The problem though can be firstly making the business case to support creativity and innovation. It can be a hard sell to a line manager, CEO or Board to invest in or give time and resources to a process that can seem essentially intangible and may or may not deliver a return. On the face of it there are no guarantees and more than a whiff of sulfur around it. Yet creative insights as part of the Innovation Process are an essential component in the success of most enterprises and businesses and are key to enabling start-ups to start-up, grow and prosper!

Is then the ability to be be inspired and be creative the sole preserve of the lucky few; remaining just an elusive butterfly for the rest of us? Is it down to nature or nurture? If your brain is wired in a particular way i.e. if you’re right hemisphere is dominant, will you be likely to be more creative than a colleague who is left-brain dominant & will he or she be more likely to be an Accountant or an Actuary? Or can it be acquired, learned, developed?

Recent research suggests that the way the brain works is in fact far more subtle than a simple left/right dominance, or vice a versa. The two hemispheres clearly do different things; for example the right-side of the brain is better at visual and spatial processing, whilst the left-side is better at language processing. However, when a person undertakes a visual or a language task, both sides of the brain are working.

It’s not an &/or in reality, but what steps can a business or organisation take to produce and support the conditions for employees to be creative and what steps can you take to prime your own brain to better solve problems, to be inspired and to be able to recognise and act creatively when the feeling grabs you?

Well one way is by using Meta-cognition techniques, or to put it another way — simply having a Thinking Strategy! Many of us actually self-edit and keep in check our creativity, stopping short and preventing ourselves having that eureka moment. There are in fact three stages in the creative process.

Stage One is where we focus on obvious ideas and solutions and this is where most of us spend our creative thinking time.

Stage Two is where the thoughts and ideas start to push against convention and it is in this phase that whilst you are still thinking inside the box, you are starting to challenge and push against the sides — but it is here where we are most likely to stop ourselves, particularly if it’s all becoming too weird or silly.

And then there’s Stage Three which is where only a minority of people get to, but it is where you are most definitely thinking outside the proverbial box and suddenly what didn’t seem possible before becomes blindingly obvious, exciting and eminently do-able! A great deal of getting to Stage Three rests on your ability to adapt, honour emergence and be comfortable with failure. There’s a great book by Tim Hartford called, ‘Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure’ and it’s well worth a read if your interested in this area.

Getting to Stage Three is also about persistence and resilience. James Dyson famously made +5176 failed prototypes, before the successful version that went on to become the best selling Dyson Vacuum.

And it’s also about tolerance, being open-minded, respecting your own ideas and those of others, embracing difference and being comfortable with ambiguity: But also crucially it’s about allowing yourself to be vulnerable, because as Brene Brown said in her first TED Talk, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity and change”.

Here Here & again I would highly recommend that you take a look-see at all her TED Talks!

To be creative businesses and organisations need Leadership that asks the right questions, creates the right conditions by moving the boundaries and uses the right language with clarity around the issues to be addressed, objectives to be taken into account and the pay-offs to be gained, to free-up those creative thinkers, Intrapreneurs and Entrepreneurs to do their thing!

Thank you for reading and I’d love as always to hear what you think.

Paul Mudd is the author of ‘Uncovering Mindfulness: In Search Of A Life More Meaningful’ available on Amazon and the ‘Coffee & A Cup Of Mindfulness’and the ‘Mindful Hacks For Mindful Living & Mindful Working’ series. He is also a Contributing Author to the Huffington Post and a Contributing Writer for Thrive Global. Through The Mudd Partnership he works with business leaders, organisations and individuals in support of change, leadership & personal excellence and introducing Mindfulness. He can be contacted at paul@themuddpartnership.co.uk and you can follow the continuing journey uncovering Mindfulness on Twitter @TheMindfulBook and at @Paul_Mudd