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PREPARE TO FAIL!

At least 50% of being successful in what you do has nothing to do with what you do! It is "the other stuff" - attitude, confidence, communication skills, customer delight and so on, that makes the difference. Always be prepared to fail. Alan Austin-Smith tells you why.

We live in a fast changing world. This means that for any business or individual to be successful, we have to be creative and innovative. Constantly coming up with new ideas and trying new things. You have a team of creative people working with you - use that creativity to stretch yourself and your business to new heights.

Here are a few ideas that will help you and your team to be more creative in your approach to business.

1. Support thoughtful failure
2. Use creative thinking
3. Listen naively

SUPPORT THOUGHTFUL FAILURE

The biggest barrier to creativity is fear. Fear of failure. Think how many times you have talked yourself out of a good idea, sat in meetings with something to say, but decided not to.

Why is that? I guarantee it is because the voices in your head were telling you that it might be a stupid idea. That it might not work. That everyone might laugh. Because of those voices we never give those ideas oxygen; we don't let them out into the world to breathe, to live, to find out whether they would work. Well your team does that too, and you have to encourage them to let their ideas out - and the best way to do that is to encourage 'thoughtful failure'.

Thomas Edison was once asked how he coped with the inevitable failure that scientists and inventors must face. "It's easy" he said "What you see as failure, I see as being successful at finding out it didn't work that way!"

Isn’t that great? What a great way to look at failure! Try it. It really does make a huge difference. This is all about changing your perception of failure, but I call it 'thoughtful failure', not 'sloppy failure'. Say you or a team member come up with an idea, think it through, consider all the options, but it just doesn't work. Or maybe someone points out something you haven't considered – a flaw in the idea. This is an example of thoughtful failure, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But let's be outrageous and set ourselves a strategy. Why not set yourself goals for failure? I know how that sounds, but remember, failure is NOT negative. It's just a word to describe part of the creative process.

Set yourself goals for failure - try and get say 5 a day. You see to get 5 failures a day you have got to get your ideas out in the open in order to achieve your goal. Try and get 5 clients to say no to colour. The only way you can achieve that is to ask at least 5 clients if they want colour!

If you want to go out for the night and make a new friend, if you set yourself a goal of getting turned down twenty times, you will have to ask at least 20 people to achieve that goal. Surely if you ask twenty people for a dance, someone will say yes.

Casanova was once asked how he was so successful with attracting women. "I just ask" was his reply!

Change your view of failure and you won't fear it. It is one of the craziest paradoxes in life. To be successful you have to start failing!If you are not failing, you are not being creative.

CREATIVE THINKING

Bring creative thinking sessions into your team meetings. Allow 10 minutes of your meeting for this and have a specific subject area such as your team into small groups and get them to use creative techniques such as brainstorming, where you just throw any ideas and thoughts randomly onto a piece of paper, not stopping to think about whether they will work, if you have the budget etc. that all comes later, after the creative process. Just get the ideas first, however silly.

Then gather up the ideas people have had and look for some that can be developed further -be brave - some of the daft ideas at this stage may be developed into workable concepts that really work.

NAÏVE LISTENING

Listen to people, but listen naively. What does naïve mean? It means without knowledge or experience - so listen without knowledge or experience sometimes.

Why? Because all that knowledge and experience will often blinker you to new ideas, new ways of doing things. Listen to your team, but listen naively.

Success in life today is directly related to our ability to be creative. It is interesting that the old intelligence or logic is no longer enough. We used to see creative people as a bit flaky, head in the clouds. Not any more, they are critical to our success, we still need logic, but without creativity we are lost.