Being Wrong is Good For Creativity

I am lucky.  I work in a creative work environment.  I get to go to work each day with other creative people where we are expected to come up with creative ways to communicate in a multitude of ways on a multitude of platforms.   Our clients love us when we get it right, but what happens if we get it wrong?  Well, we don’t feel the love.  But here is an interesting twist, and one that I believe.  Being wrong is good for creativity.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a video on Ted.com where Sir Ken Robinson, known as a creativity expert, speaks on the topic of schools killing creativity.  He makes many interesting and valid points — and one that resonated with me was his connection between killing creativity in the schools and the way we run our companies.

Here is an excerpt from his talk. “What we know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.  And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.  They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way.  We stigmatize mistakes. And now we are running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.  And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Within our business we have a ton of pressure to deliver creativity and to get it right.  So how can we as business owners and leaders nurture our people’s creative capacities?  Let them be wrong. Encourage people to throw out ideas without any fear of being wrong.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the increase in creativity.