Should Failure Be An Option for Communicators?

In mid-April, IT and mobile developers will gather in New York City to celebrate their failures. FAILfaire will feature an interactive discussion of #FAILed projects to help promote shared lessons and greater understanding of the challenges inherent in innovating. In an industry where the failure rate is estimated at 70 percent, it’s essential to learn from mistakes.

We’ve seen incredible advances in the communications profession over the past two decades, but are we sharing enough about what we’ve done wrong? When we see a story about a PR failure, do we applaud the risk-taker, or are we simply grateful that we were spared the same fate?  Sure, we learn from each other’s mistakes, but do we also live in fear of making our own? Would our profession survive with a 70 percent fail rate? How many of us would lose our credibility or our jobs?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/phobia/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” – Woody Allen

If you’re ready to risk failure for a greater reward, consider these principles of  innovation from The Center for Creative Leadership:

• Pay attention to the whole picture. Look deeply into a situation for new patterns and new opportunities. How can you add to an existing PR idea to make it more effective or unique?
• Value personal experience as much you’ve been taught to embrace research and best practices. Consider ideas, patterns or strands of insight from your whole life. Your experience as a guitar player could lead you to create a musical approach to a communications challenge.
• Use your imagination to answer the question “what if …” Get comfortable asking that question of your PR team.
• Spend some time in serious play. Business thinking and routine work can become a rigid process. Innovation requires bending some rules, branching out and having some fun.
• Collaborate. Innovations are rarely made by a “lone genius.” Insights come through thoughtful, non-judgmental sharing of ideas. Give up time-wasting procedural meetings for idea-generating, productive gatherings.
• Discourage “high-stakes” decision making. Innovation requires us to abandon either-or thinking and be open to a third or fourth, or currently non-existent solution.

Finally, don’t be afraid to do your profession a favor by sharing your communications mistakes. I, for one, look forward to learning from them…and sharing a few of my own.