A permission to Fail
Ayesha Walawalkar, Chief Strategy Officer at MullenLowe Group UK, writes in Campaign magazine.
What sort of person is made for success? It is not a certain character, but the knowledge that you will be fine if you fail.
In a recent project exploring how we foster creativity, I came across the latest (2021) Ideas Report from WeTransfer.com. The report outlines findings of research among people in creative industries, across 135 countries. It’s beautifully produced and liberally peppered with headlines that are pure clickbait.
One such headline that caught my eye was: “Creativity is dying in the West – make way for younger, bolder challengers!”
The rationale for this headline is the finding that creative professionals in Latin America are 12% more likely to take risks than their Western counterparts, 11% more confident in their ideas and 11% more optimistic about their careers.
They are also, the report says, younger and hungrier (possibly quite literally, as 38% of them apparently earn less than $10,000 per annum). In comparison, creatives in North America and Europe are not only paid more but are: “Stagnating and, well, growing old…”
The resulting prognosis for Western creativity is pretty dicey: “It looks like the West is getting comfortable, preferring to rest in what’s familiar – we wonder if it’s an effective survival strategy in these uncertain times?”
This begs the question as to what the report authors believe does constitute an effective survival strategy? To recap the logic: creatives who confidently take risks are younger, get paid less and live in LatAm (or elsewhere in the developing world).
Ergo, if we want agencies full of bold, confident risk takers, should we:
- Fire everyone over 45?
- Halve everyone’s salary?
- Hire exclusively from Latin America?
- All of the above?
Parking for a moment the practical hurdles to pursuing any of these options (hurdles such as the fact that with only 19% of our industry over the age of 45, there’s hardly any of them left to fire, or that we’ve seen an exodus of international creatives from the UK sparked by Brexit and accelerated by the pandemic, or that the ensuing resource crunch – far from enabling salary cuts – has driven spiralling wage inflation), let’s assume the options are viable. Are they actually desirable? And if we pursued them, is there any guarantee of success?
There are lots of studies that demonstrate the link between creativity and the preparedness to take intellectual and social risks: that show how willingness to consider and test ideas outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom – so risking the possibility of failure – is a prerequisite for innovation.
Intellectual risk-taking is described in the quote attributed to Pablo Picasso when he says: “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” But Picasso was still experimenting and taking those intellectual risks well into his 80s, whereas we seem today to associate innovation and constructive rule breaking exclusively with youth.
Our youth bias is so strong that entrepreneurs under the age of 35 attract roughly twice as much funding as older competitors, despite the fact that start ups founded by people in their 50s are 1.8 times more likely to succeed.
Mark Zuckerberg famously said in 2007 that “Young people are just smarter”.
But 10 years later, in his 2017 Harvard commencement address, he talked about success being predicated on having time and permission to fail: “I know lots of people who haven’t pursued dreams because they didn’t have a cushion to fall back on if they failed. If I had to support my family growing up instead of having time to code, if I didn’t know I’d be fine, if Facebook didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”
So while youth and energy and ideas are great, without a supportive environment in which to safely try out those ideas, creativity and innovation never take off.
Brazilian and Columbian agencies are certainly creative rising stars but, in my (admittedly superficial) experience, their success depends less on the age of their staff than their culture of actively embracing and enjoying creative risk, combined with their drive to make things happen.
Replicating that culture is not about demographic cleansing: it’s the opposite. It’s about maximising diversity of experience to spark fresh ways of seeing things: diversity of age, of culture, gender and so on. It’s about ditching the draining anxiety that so many in our industry feel as they pass 40 and sense their careers coming to an end.
Above all, it’s about giving ourselves licence to take a few risks, because failures shouldn’t be fatal – they’re a necessary step en route to success.
