Do Wrong Right — Hornall Anderson

Failure is an inevitable and even beneficial part of the creative process. Any number of quips and clichés tell us that if we’re not failing, we’re not trying hard enough. The benefits of buzzwords like rapid prototyping and agile development are well known, in theory. But if you work in the creative services industry, you get paid to solve problems. It’s important to remember that failure as part of a process is beneficial, but failure as a result is, well, still failure. So how do we make room for “Whoops” in a world where success is measured by “Cha-Ching?”

We can start by acknowledging that for many years, we agency folks have not handled failure well. We’ve wasted a lot of energy obscuring our setbacks or abandoning unsatisfactory results as screw-ups rather than stepping stones. Next, we can learn from some examples of how different companies use wrong answers to find the right ones. Willingness to fail is not a license to neglect concept or strategic foundation. Today we face more scrutiny than ever from clients and competitors. If we want to allow failure into our process, we have to prepare them to handle it, learn from it, and move past it, just as we do ourselves.