Growth is life itself, and life is learning. We cannot truly grow in our professional and personal success without understanding failure too. There will be mistakes along the way, even in the most successful careers and enterprises. Today I’m advocating for some tolerance for mistakes.
Repeated mistakes as a pattern, of course, will thwart your growth and get you into trouble. That is why we say that the biggest mistake of all is not learning from your mistakes. We all make them, but just maybe we should have a philosophical tolerance for making “better” mistakes. Trial and error and those pesky mistakes often lead to something very good: innovation.
The trait of innovation is much admired in the design professions, yet mistakes are not admired at all. Can we innovate without failure? I’ve come to understand that if we are afraid to fail we will never excel at innovation.
In the marketplace of the future there will be much more demand for innovation. It is in this context that we must come to understand our professional practices to be relevant and differentiated—standing apart from the pack of firms operating in the very dense zone of commodity services.
European and Asian firms are being noted for advanced innovation, often beating out comparable U.S. organizations. That’s right, large and small, U.S. firms are sometimes regarded as laggards in innovation in the global marketplace. Even at global elite levels there is a pattern of selection that favors non-U.S. architects. The Pritzker Prize has not been given to a U.S. firm since 1992 (15 years). In the 27 years the prize has been given it has gone to a U.S. architect only seven times (Johnson, Roche, Pei, Meier, Bunshaft, Gehry and Venturi). In the last five years even the AIA Gold Medal has only gone to a U.S. architect twice (Graves and Mockbee). In one of those years the AIA chose not to give the award at all. Perhaps this form of award recognition is off track as it relates to your own practice but certainly it helps to convey the underlying concern about architects and innovation.
I’m not suggesting that you be driven by just awards or contests. These are the shallowest indicators of relevance. Do you doubt this? Talk directly with Cesar Pelli, Norman Foster, or Renzo Piano and ask them how important award recognition really is to them. But then ask about innovation. Each will say, “Ah, now that is important to growth and success.”
The real point of my message is that for you to compete strategically in the future there will be increasing pressure to challenge the standard in both process and product. Make innovation your friend. Make peace with mistakes and always channel what you learn from your mistakes into the body of knowledge used by your firm. You can turn fear into fortune, and mistakes into profitable milestones.
—James P. Cramer
