In our classes and workshops, we first ask people to work through quick design challenges, whether it’s to redesign the gift-giving experience or to rethink their daily commute. We may jump in with some help or a small nudge, but mostly we let them figure out solutions themselves. Building confidence through experience encourages more creative action in the future, which further bolsters confidence. For this reason, we frequently ask students and team members to complete multiple quick design projects rather than one big project, to maximize the number of learning cycles.
At the d.school, one of the goals of getting people to work together on a project is to help them practice new skills and challenge themselves—and most likely experience failure as a result. We believe the lessons learned from failures may make us smarter—even stronger. But that doesn’t make failure any more fun. So most of us naturally try to avoid failure at all costs. Failure is hard, even painful. As Stanford professor Bob Sutton and IDEO partner Diego Rodriguez often say at the d.school, “Failure sucks, but instructs.”
The inescapable link between failure and innovation is a lesson you can learn only through doing. We give students a chance to fail as soon as possible, in order to maximize the learning time that follows. Instead of long lectures followed by exercises, most of our classes at the d.school give students a little instruction up front and then get them working on a project or a challenge. We follow up in debriefs to reflect on what succeeded—and what can be learned from things that didn’t work.
“Many d.school classes demand that student teams keep pushing the limits of possibility until they face-plant,” says IDEO partner and consulting associate professor Chris Flink. “The personal resilience, courage, and humility born of a healthy failure form a priceless piece of their education and growth.”
Facing failure in order to wipe away the fear is something understood intuitively by our friend John “Cass” Cassidy, lifelong innovator and creator of Klutz Press. In his book Juggling for the Complete Klutz, Cass didn’t start us out juggling two balls, or even one. He began with something more basic: “The Drop.” Step one is simply to throw all three balls in the air and let them drop. Then repeat. In learning to juggle, the angst comes from failure—from having the ball fall to the floor. So with step one, Cass aims to numb aspiring jugglers to that. Having the ball fall to the floor becomes more normal than the ball not falling to the floor. After we address our fear of failure, juggling becomes a lot easier. The two of us were skeptical at first, but with the help of his simple approach, we really did learn to juggle.
Fear of failure holds us back from learning all sorts of new skills, from taking on risks, and from tackling new challenges. Creative confidence asks that we overcome that fear. You know you are going to drop the ball, make mistakes, and go in a wrong direction or two. But you come to accept that it’s part of learning. And in doing so, you are able to remain confident that you are moving forward despite the setbacks.
OVERCOMING FEAR OF CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS
We know from experience that our students often have a fear of venturing out onto the turf of customers and users in attempts to gain empathy with them. At the d.school, lecturer Caroline O’Connor and managing director Sarah Stein Greenberg have helped many students move past that fear, one step at a time. Here are a few ways of gaining empathy that they suggest, adapted for use in a business context. The techniques on the list start out easy and become increasingly challenging.
1. BE A “FLY ON THE WALL” IN AN ONLINE FORUM. Pay attention as potential customers share feedback, air their grievances, and ask questions. You’re not looking for evaluations of features or cost; you’re searching for pain points and latent needs among the people on the forum.
2. TRY YOUR OWN CUSTOMER SERVICE. Go through the experience of interacting with customer service, pretending to be a customer. Notice how your problem is handled, and how you feel along the way. Try mapping out the individual steps in the process and then graph the ups and downs of your mood or satisfaction.
3. TALK WITH UNEXPECTED EXPERTS. What does the receptionist have to say about your firm’s customer experience? If you’re in health care, talk to a medical assistant rather than a doctor. If you make a physical product, ask a repair person to tell you about what goes wrong with it.
4. PLAY DETECTIVE IN PURSUIT OF INSIGHT. Take some reading material and a pair of headphones to a retail space or an industry conference (or, if your customers are internal, an area where people tend to gather). Observe people’s behavior, and try to figure out what is going on. How are they interacting with your product or service? What can you glean from their body language that indicates their level of engagement or interest?
5. INTERVIEW SOME CUSTOMERS. Think of a few open-ended questions about your product or service. Go to a place where your customers spend time, and find someone you are comfortable approaching. Tell them you’d like to ask a few questions. If the person refuses, no problem, just try someone else. Eventually you’ll find someone who’s willing—even dying—to talk to you. Press for more detail with every question. Ask “Why?” and “Can you tell me more about that?”—even if you think you already know the answer. Sometimes their responses will surprise you and point you toward new opportunities.
URGENT OPTIMISM
We can all learn something about effort and failure from the world of gaming. Author, futurist, and game designer Jane McGonigal talked to us recently about how video gaming can spark its own form of creative confidence. Jane makes a convincing case that harnessing the power of video games can have a major impact on life in the real world. In the realm of video games, the level of challenge and reward rises proportionately with a gamer’s skills; moving forward always requires concentrated effort, but the next goal is never completely out of reach. This contributes to what Jane calls “urgent optimism”: the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, motivated by the belief that you have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an “epic win” is possible—that it is worth trying, and trying now, over and over again. In the euphoria of an epic win, gamers are shocked to discover the extent of their capabilities. As you move from level to level, success can flip your mindset to a state of creative confidence. We’ve all seen this kind of persistence and gradual mastery of skills in children—from toddlers learning to walk to kids learning how to shoot a basketball.
Tom witnessed urgent optimism in action one Christmas morning when his teenage son Sean opened up a Tony Hawk skateboard video game and started trying it out. In addition to the usual on-screen action, the game comes with a controller that looks exactly like a real skateboard—minus the wheels. So there was Sean, balancing on a full-sized skateboard in the family room, surrounded by three generations of Kelleys. The family watched failure after failure as Sean’s character on screen smashed into brick walls, skidded off of railings, and collided with other skaters. Potentially more embarrassing, Sean himself fell off the skateboard controller several times, nearly crashing through the glass coffee table beside him on the floor. But neither the on-screen calamities nor the occasional loss of balance in the physical world fazed Sean one bit. In the social context of the gaming world, he wasn’t really failing—despite the noisy on-screen sound effects of his spectacular falls. Sean knew that he was on a path to learning. In fact, since reading about a video game is not much help, he was on essentially the only path available to gaining expertise.
By adapting the best attributes of gaming culture, we can shift people’s view of failure and ratchet up their willingness and determination to persevere. We just need to hold out a “reasonable hope of success,” as well as the possibility of a truly epic win. For example, in working with colleagues or on a team, we’ve found that if team members believe that every idea gets fair consideration, and that a meritocracy allows their proposals to be judged across divisional and hierarchical lines, they tend to put all of their