Up from the ashes

I’ve been annoying those working close to me this week by putting the soundtrack to the children’s musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a continuous loop in my office. In a movie chock-full of singable moments, my favourite is the short musical sequence The Roses of Success:

You tube link: The Roses of Success

 Much has been written already about the importance of creative failure (although I doubt you’ll find a more succinct and entertaining synopsis than the one above). Goodness knows, there isn’t a financial institution in the world that wants to talk about failure right now. Credit unions and banks cannot forget that we have a responsibility to behave prudently with money that isn’t ours, and that the consequences of our actions can affect people that we don’t even know. We need to be careful.

But the pressure to change – and the opportunity to drive change ourselves through innovation – remains strong, and no innovation occurs without the prospect of failure. Our situation right now is especially delicate: we need to behave prudently (and be seen to behave prudently), without neglecting the imperative to continue to change, adapt and lead.

Like many companies Westminster Savings uses social media tools to create a space internally where ideas – any ideas – can be floated for discussion, refining, and advocacy. It’s an active space, because we’re among friends internally, and so – there’s no other way to put this – it’s a better space for failure. One of our most important challenges is to create spaces  – laboratories, really – where candid conversations can take place, crazy diagrams can be drawn, and unexpected explosions can occur… without wider consequences.

The first step is to create the space for candid conversation.  That’s why I’m excited about CUInnovate, a place where interesting (and good looking!) people with mutual interests can bounce ideas off of each other. It’s a space for posting ideas, commenting about ideas, politely criticizing ideas where warranted, and polishing and refining ideas. We can use it to celebrate successful ideas. We can also use it to examine (and celebrate!) unsuccessful ideas.

Celebrating a brave failure (sort of)
I’ve been following the discussion online about Chase’s intention to usher the WAMU Occasio branches out the door (here’s a good starting point to the discussion). Chase regards the Occasio concept as a (sort of) failure. The marketer in me suspects that this is more about how the residue of a now notorious brand gets wiped away. Regardless, the WAMU guys, now presumably scattered to the ends of the earth, need a pat on the back for giving it a shot.

Because if you don’t try, you don’t get.

(Plus, it’s spawned an imitator or two.)