Ben Shaw, MullenLowe’s CSO, discusses the importance of embracing failure in creative projects.
“Failure with a capital C.
Mandate failure. Every project should have failure built into it.
In creative agencies presenting the answer is seen as bold and decisive.
In startups following one route to the answer is naive, short-sighted, and risky. Startups explore multiple paths to success, knowing some routes have an increased failure rate, but they allow collating more data about what could be right.
The wrong can validate the right.
Never present one strategy, never present just one route, it implies you already know what the answer is and there is nothing to learn. Which is the exact opposite of the reality of creative development.
There isn’t a perfect answer, there isn’t a perfect process, and there isn’t one way to make things. If there were, it would already be perfectly replicable (and we’d be replaced by now!)
There is always something to learn from a 'no'.
Creativity so often isn’t A to B, it’s A to B to C, but you wouldn’t get C without the B.
Mandate failure to find out what C is.”