A few words on ‘failure’

Throughout this course you may have spotted a recurring feature – the central role of accidents, mistakes, and failure.

Right back in Week 1, amongst our review of historic innovators (Step 1.8) and summary of creative habits (Step 1.9), we said that embracing failure was a critical habit to adopt. However, it’s sometimes difficult to accept that something didn’t go to plan, and keep going.

So, as we come to the end of the programme we wanted to reiterate this valuable lesson.

Here are four reasons, from the four weeks of this course, to embrace failure as a means of innovating:

Reason 1: Innovative and original ideas are hard to find. You must explore a lot of dead-ends to find something somewhere that no-one else has looked before. Resilience, persistence and self-belief are important characteristics that emerge in response to failure.

“The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most… you need a lot of bad ideas to get to a few good ones.” Adam Grant (2016)

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

But don’t just believe us, in the next step our graduate case studies share their views on failure too.

Grant, A. (2016), The surprising habits of original thinkers, TED talk, recorded February 2016 at TED2016