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When it comes to creating a great work of
art, practice makes perfect, writes Matthew Syed.
A design college in the United States has
just started a new exhibition about creativity, which will run till January. It
is called "Permission to Fail". The curator asked a group of 50
prestigious designers and illustrators to send in their mess-ups, rough drafts
and preliminary sketches so that they could be put on display.
Now, this may seem like an odd thing to
do. Most exhibitions are all about the finished product, the pristine new car
design, perhaps, or the flawless painting. But the college, called Mount Ida in
Massachusetts, wanted its students to engage not with the finished article, but
what happened beforehand. They wanted to reach into the true characteristics of
how creativity happens.
Creativity is something we can all
improve at... it is about daring to learn from our mistakes James Dyson
A quick story: In their book Art and Fear, David Bayles and
Ted Orland tell of a ceramics teacher who announced on the opening day of class
that he was dividing the students into two groups. Half were told that they
would be graded on quantity. On the final day of term, the teacher said he'd
come to class with some scales and weigh the pots they had made. They would get
an "A" for 50lb of pots, a "B" for 40lb, and so on. The other
half would be graded on quality. They just had to bring along their one,
pristine, perfectly designed pot.
The results were emphatic - the works of
highest quality, the most beautiful and creative designs, were all produced by
the group graded for quantity. As Bayles
and Orland put it, "It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily
churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the 'quality'
group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to
show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
This turns out to be a profound metaphor.
The British inventor James Dyson didn't create the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner
in a flash of inspiration. The product, now used by millions, didn't emerge
fully formed in his mind. Instead, he did what the group graded for quantity
did. He tried and failed, triggering new insights, before trying and failing
again - and slowly the design improved.
In fact, Dyson worked his way through
5,126 failed prototypes before coming up with a design that ultimately
transformed household cleaning. As he put it: "People think of creativity
as a mystical process. This model conceives of innovation as something that
happens to geniuses. But this could not be more wrong. Creativity is something
we can all improve at, by realising that it has specific characteristics. Above
all, it is about daring to learn from our mistakes".
As Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar,
put it: "Early on, all of our movies suck. That's a blunt assessment, I
know, but I… choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to
convey how bad the first versions of our films really are. I'm not trying to be
modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and
our job is to make them go… from suck to non-suck. We are true believers in the
iterative process - reworking, reworking and reworking again, until a flawed
story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul."
The problem in the world today is that we
only see the final product - the amazing movie, the super-efficient vacuum
cleaner, the vogue theory. What we don't see is the deeper story of how these
innovations emerge. The tales we tell about creativity overlook this, too. We
think of Archimedes shouting "eureka" or Newton being hit on the head
by the apple and instantaneously inventing the theory of gravity.
But these stories are pure fiction. They
get the direction of creativity the wrong way around. Insight is the endpoint
of a long term, iterative process, rather than the starting point. As the
neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it in The Secret Lives of the Brain:
"When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, the neural circuitry
has been working on the problems for hours or days or years, consolidating
information and trying out new combinations. But you merely take credit without
further wonderment at the vast, hidden political machinery behind the
scenes."
Creativity is a journey that involves
taking wrong turns along the way
And this is precisely why the design
college was so keen to exhibit the failures and wrong turns. This couldn't be
of deeper significance, because unless we truly understand how creativity
happens, it will remain elusive. Youngsters who are taught to think about failure
in a more positive light not only become more creative, but more resilient,
too. They regard their mess-ups not as reasons to give up, but as intriguing
and educative. They engage with these failures, learn from them, and, by
implication, develop new insights, and ever deeper curiosity.
"Dare to fail" is a powerful
slogan. It doesn't mean we should aim at failure - rather it hints at the
paradox that creativity is a journey that involves taking wrong turns along the
way. Organisations like Google, Apple, Dyson and Pixar have developed cultures
that, in their different ways, create the conditions for empowering failure.
They have become living ecosystems of the imagination, fired by the courage to
test ideas, to see their flaws, and to be triggered into new associations and
insights.
As Andrew Stanton, director of Finding
Nemo and WALL-E, put it: "My strategy has always been: be wrong as fast as
we can... which basically means, we're gonna screw up, let's just admit that.
Let's not be afraid of that. You can't get to adulthood before you go through
puberty. I won't get it right the first time, but I will get it wrong really
soon, really quickly."
Matthew Syed is the author of Black Box
Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success
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