New year, new you?

January brings newspapers, magazines and timelines full of good intentions, new year resolutions, life hacks and plans to make sure that this is your year both personally and professionally. A streamlined path to success is promised on every platform and there’s a podcast, subscription, new notebook or meal prep plan which claims to be part of the secret formula to make it big.

There’s plenty of pushback, with claims that this go-getting, goal-setting mindset is really just setting us up to fail. It turns out that might not be such a bad thing - perhaps it’s time to embrace failure and face our flops, seeing them not as an embarrassment but as an essential step on our learning journey and a way to stimulate our creativity.

A travelling exhibition will come to the UK this spring, dedicated to missteps and mistakes, design disasters and catastrophes (both culinary and corporate). The Museum of Failure addresses one of the biggest taboos in our society, and rather than ridicule, reframes failure and aims to understand its lessons, risks and ambition. This collection of failed products and services from around the world shows that innovation needs failure - innovation is a tricky business and the insights gained from making mistakes are incredibly valuable when we look at them as an opportunity to learn and progress.

While this is an exhibition that includes failure from all corners of the globe, its founder Samuel West believes that the UK is its natural home, with British-born exhibits featuring prominently. From the Titanic and Brexit to the Amstrad e-mailer, the Sinclair C5 and The Body Shop, we’re invited to think differently about risk, creativity and resilience.

This is an approach that strikes a chord with us. It may be tempting to aim for cookie-cutter perfection every time, but that’s not going to result in projects that spark joy and create memorable spaces or events. In our sector there’s plenty of room for rigidity and conforming to regulations but sometimes giving ourselves the freedom to fall can deliver a product that’s something special which wouldn’t have existed without a few failures in the back catalogue.

Our recent installation for HIX London felt like a bit of a risk - and indeed was the result of some early false starts and ideas which fell by the wayside once we’d discussed them more deeply. But a false start can lead to a stronger finish and by being brave we think that the final product was more interesting, more engaging and more creative. It didn’t have to be perfectly polished but it did pique curiosity and provoked conversation and connections, which was our aim all along. The bespoke furniture we created for the installation was a deliberate counterpoint to the perfect pieces selected for the opposing side of the stand - an angular armchair and sidechair complete with visible oozing glue. The standout piece was a sofa which exposed the typically unseen construction that lies beneath finished furniture. This became a conversation piece which sparked discussion and generated new ideas - just what we’d hoped when we first considered the installation months earlier.

A refusal to fear failure has been a hallmark of some of the best creators in our culture. From Dylan’s challenge of the acoustic status quo to Rick Rubin’s refusal to consider the critical reception or write with an audience in mind. Having this sort of freedom results in some truly great work, as acknowledged by author David Szalay in his Booker Prize acceptance speech. He credited his publisher with letting him make mistakes, take risks and rewrite many times before the manuscript for Flesh was submitted. The finished novel is bold and brave which was acknowledged by the judges and literary critics alike.

So let’s look forward to the Museum of Failure when it lands in the UK, not to sneer but to embrace its possibilities. While there’s no guarantee of success and many failures lead only to a dead end, we can see so many positives in the ethos that taking calculated risks will help drive invention and continued creativity in our fast-changing world.