Learning to #fail

It was a privilege for Triple Double to be the main speaker at University of the Arts London’s Awarding Body Conference earlier this year, where I first spoke about this subject.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

— Michael Jordan

Failing is a mindset, not an outcome.

I was told by my school teachers that I would ‘fail’ with my career if I decided to leave school after my GCSE exams and go straight to college to study a BTEC in design, instead of doing A-Levels. 😂

I was then told by one of university tutors that I shouldn’t be working with commercial brands during my final year of study — that it was the ‘wrong’ thing to do. 😂

So I did both.

As Triple Double turned 3 years old in September, it has given me a chance to reflect on what’s gone well so far and what hasn’t.

I’ve personally found failure to be the best ongoing life lesson.

How do you feel about failing?

Each scenario when something fails is unique, comprised of a set of dominos that cause the next step. The steps makes sense why they happened upon reflection, but in the moment, it seems like all sorts of chaos is happening. Eventually though, if you stick with it, the steps take you from failing to succeeding. If you’re mentally prepared for failure instead of trying to constantly stop the inevitable tumble in your next scenario, you’ll learn and move forward.

Approaching failure in this way means it’s less about focusing on each individual step in a negative sense and more understanding why each step happened, in a positive sense. Thinking how you could improve next time. This is the difference between failing being an outcome and a state of mind.

Try things out, get things wrong, do things quickly, do things slowly. But always iterate, experiment and most importantly, play.

Design, we think as a studio, should be all of these things. If it’s done well, it will help yourself and who you’re designing for to also understand and learn the true value and power that design can bring to the table.

Design by nature is an iterative and evolving process, not a first idea is the final idea process. That’s when the exciting stuff, and true learning (failing) starts to happen.

I would be lying if I was fully bought into how I now position the concept of ‘failing’ from day one. Let’s face it, no one’s aim is to fail with what they do. But as designers, it’s easy to place safety nets at every opportunity we can, to defend what we’re going to do, even before we’ve done it. And defend what we’ve done, if it’s questioned on any level. If something goes wrong why can’t we just put our hands up and say, “My bad, I got it wrong. I’ll try to improve it next time.”

When something really breaks, it gives you the perfect opportunity to realise that failing isn’t actually so bad. This opportunity is the sweet spot. If you miss it, you’ll be hitting more duds in the scenario that follows. If you recognise it, you can create the energy to react to it and improve, helping you in the moment and in the future.

This idea of a ‘breaking’ moment was when I personally started to take note of how powerful failure is, and how it has helped to move Triple Double forward.

One example that stands out is firing a client in 2016. When it was happening, was I stressed out? Yes. Was I unsure of the outcomes, both reputation wise and legally? Yes.

But from a legal stand point, the client had broken the contract that was agreed between us.

They also broke, in numerous ways, our fundamental ways of working as a studio: with a mutual trust, respect and understanding between us and them.

One of the practical learnings that we took away was to amend our project contracts to protect us from a legal perspective in the future.

One person could look at this as a failure, losing out financially. For us, it was a massive gain. After the project ended we freed up the time to work with clients who respected our values and we’ve been working with them ever since.

So it’s not a case of what, but a matter of when you’re going to fail in whatever job or role you do. If you can accept that you’re going to fail, like we experienced, then you can learn and take so much away from it for the better. Just be mentally ready for it.

It’s obviously not always doom and gloom, we are a team that have plenty of wins and 1UPs. One of our main wins, that more often than not happens on a daily basis is learning new things from people. The face-to-face stuff or the behind the received email stuff. You know, the ‘ah I understand now’ learnings. But even this has its ups and downs. We’ve just learnt to take things as they come because we know not everything we take onboard is going to work out when we put it into practice. The failing mindset.

Myself and the team are constantly learning skills and taking experiences away from each other, our clients, our fans and friends.

This never stops.

It should never stop.

In fact, I always say that when you stop learning, it’s time to move on.

Recently, I’ve been complimented on my brownie baking (I’ve only made 3 batches so far), so I’ve got my alternate career ready if all this design stuff doesn’t work out. 😬

We feel a lot of designers could be helping people to learn much more. But instead, they are good at keeping things to themselves. We hear it all the time when we’re speaking to a new client. “It was their way or the highway.” Designers are specialists at what they do, helping people with their problems in a specific and valuable way. But we’re big believers that as designers, we should also be helping everyone to learn and gain the knowledge we have — at every step of the way.

By opening up when things are going wrong, and right, designers can help others to succeed by exposing these experiences and learnings. And vice versa. We learn together, meaning we collaborate, and are a happier team. It’s as simple as that.

By ‘learning to #fail’, you will drive your own innovation every day. Innovation isn’t ‘perfection’ or ‘success’. Innovation comes from trying things and failing, repeatedly. The failing process is what creates success.

So…failure.

Mentally accept it will happen. Because something will break. Big time.

You’re never going to learn until it happens. 💪