Fail to Learn or Learn to Fail?

Welcome to Listen For Insight. I’m your host Logan Raukar. We have for you Dr. Jim Friedman, a professor in marketing and entrepreneurship at Miami University, and his insights on failure, creativity, and the link between the two. I send you now to our interviewer David Ternik. 

David: Sure! alright so first thing I want to ask you is if you had the opportunity to design your own creativity and innovation Institute what would that look like. 

Dr. Friedman: That’s funny I actually have the opportunity to create my own design and innovation institute. what would it look like it would be very student centric. Very experiential. As any of my students can tell you I believe highly in the importance of celebrating failure and again not the failure that comes from driving South on Northbound I-75 I’m not talking about actually failing classes I’m not talking about actually losing money for your company I’m talking about the little failures that give us the opportunity to try again and figure out a different way to do things. more often than not and this goes for student and for faculty we have a tendency to stay within our comfort zones. we do what we know we do what we know is going to be successful and so we have a tendency to take a problem and come up with a solution do it and get it done. done is good and especially at a time when nobody’s really holding us accountable for anything new and different and exciting so what I try to get my students to understand is that if you come up with the first right answer and do it well you’ve only started now you got to keep going. Do it until you fail because then you’re actually trying something that nobody else has tried so I would have, my center would have a lot of opportunities to experiment and experience and fail and and share those failures because what the coolest thing about failures is the ability to start again do it different.

Host: Dr. Jim Friedman went on to discuss the need for a comfortable space in order to fail and think creatively.

Dr. Friedman: unfortunately too often we care more about the buildings than we care about the people inside the buildings and so the space has to be a space where people are comfortable being and communicating and spending a lot of time. Because creativity does take a lot of time.

David: Do you have a creative space that you default to or that you prefer or is it more about a dynamic environment where it’s always different, or an experience you have there? 

Dr. Friedman: I have my own innovation room where where I work. one of the wall is floor-to ceiling, wall-to-wall books. I love books. If you come into my office I put a round table in my office so that my time with students isn’t sitting across the desk from them we’re all sitting around a round table. often times when I have office hours it’s not just one student in there but there’ll be multiple so that when a student asks a question it’s often times another student who has a best answer for it. I don’t believe that I’m the smartest person in the room I don’t believe that what I have to say is more relevant than other students 

David: So another thing you mentioned earlier is comfort zones and the need to get people out of their comfort zones do you have when you’re dealing with students or you’re taking the role of an instructor or mentor do you have a go to move to take somebody out of their comfort zone and to push their boundaries to get them thinking more broadly or just in a different way?

Dr. Friedman: oh not really a go to move, but I will find ways to to get them to challenge themselves. I’ll have a student come in, I’ll give an assignment, and one student came in and said I’m so excited about this assignment, let me tell you how I’m going to do it and I said oh yea tell me tell me. And he told me this idea and he said it’s perfect isn’t it and I said yes it, but it’s the only one you’re not allowed to turn in. And he said If it’s the perfect idea, why can’t I turn it in and I said because it was your first idea and while it may be perfect you have to go beyond the first right idea and it forced him to ideate a lot of other things. it was very nice. he came up with some out standing ideas you know and the next time he came to my office he had dozens of them. And found actually ones that he liked better than the original we talk about there are projects in class that require a student to take a risk that require them to step outside their comfort zone.

Host: Dr. Friedman emphasized bringing people out of their comfort zone to promote creativity. This led to a discussion on Jia Jiang’s 100 days of rejection in which Jiang put himself in situations in which he would be rejected and hear the word no. This was something Dr. Friedman thought everyone could learn from.

Dr. Friedman: This is something that I don’t think students accept enough of, that somebody saying no to us is not a terrible thing, for us getting something wrong is not a terrible thing. It makes us stronger, it makes us wiser so it’s something that we should do constantly. 

David: do you have an experience that you would like to share, maybe your favorite failure where you can think of a time when when you were told that you were wrong or what your idea just didn’t work the way you expected it to but you can think about what it is that you learned? 

Dr. Friedman: oh my goodness I could tell you failures I could tell you all kinds of failures. See let’s begin with I had my own company and a professor here at Miami quit 4 days before the semester began and someone at the university called me up and they said somebody just quit we need somebody to teach this class and I said not only have I never taught that class but I have never taken that class. I don’t know what it’s about. And they said oh yea that’s no problem you’ll figured it out. Do you want to teach it and I said yea I’ll come teach it. what I know from previous experiences is you can never really teach a class by reading the textbook one week before the students do. That’s just not a good strategy. So they said this other guy is teaching the class at eight in the morning you can take his class at eight and then teach it at 11. so that’s what I did. I came here I went to class at 8 in the morning watched him teach it and then I tried to teach it at 11 o’clock. I was the worst professor on the in the history of teaching that semester. I have argued that the students deserve to get their money back for how I did that class. When I got to the end of the class I realized what I should’ve been teaching all along I didn’t because I didn’t understand final project I didn’t understand what the tools were and what was critical to be teaching up to that final thing. I taught that class for years after that and felt very confident but partially because of how badly I taught it the first time. So that was a very humbling one but also very exciting one. I fail every semester and I fail generally every single class period. There’s something that I try that doesn’t work. I try to be transparent to the students and I try to say you know that didn’t work very well I’m going to try that again in a different way later on so I’m constantly tinkering with things. You know for the most part everything you do could be done better. 

Host: Dr. Friedman described his ideas on failure and creativity, but we wondered one more thing…

David: Define Creativity.

Dr. Friedman: Um Define Creativity. You know there was a guy who actually wanted to do that. His name was Mel Rhodes. In 1961 he was going to come up with the definition of creativity. And after studying all the literature and talking to all the all the scientists, all the researchers, all the scholars. he realized that he could not come up with a single definition of creativity. He did, however, come up with the concept of the 4 P’s of creativity that all creative definitions either come in the form of the creative person, the creative product, the creative process or the creative path. which is the fancy word for environment, a creative place where creativity happens. for me creativity is thought. creativity is thinking differently. Creativity is intentionally going beyond the first right answer innovation is taking the creative thought and making it happen. creativity is not about making things happen. creativity is about thinking differently. so if creativity is the thought and innovation is the action, nobody should be innovative without first being creative and nobody should be creative without then being innovative. creativity without innovation doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just a thought without anything behind it. so I like to call it second right answer creativity. My name is Jim Friedman I’m the white family professor of creativity and entrepreneurship in the institute of entrepreneurship in the farmer school of business. thank you for listening for insight.