Creative Courage: Champion Experimentation

Creative courage is a critical leadership skill for driving meaningful innovation. Alex Budak, Faculty Director of the Berkeley Changemaker program, shares that embracing failure is a powerful pathway to achieving breakthrough performance.

Video Transcript

Alex Budak: Creative courage means putting yourself and your ideas out into the world. It's about imagining what could be. I mean, sharing bold ideas, championing experimentation, and inviting others to do the same, even while knowing that some efforts will inevitably fail. 

Leaders who take creative risks and lead with creative courage drive innovation for themselves and for their teams, making it safe for themselves and others to try new things, knowing that some ideas will fail along the way. 

The first way to lead with creative courage is to make room for risks. My favorite question to ask teams that I lead is how did you fail this week? Doing so not only normalizes failure, it also shows that we encourage trying new things, knowing that of course there will be setbacks and flops along the way. 

The second way is to shrink the stakes. Find ways to lower the pressure by testing the waters in smaller and simpler ways. Before you go, big, pilot a concept in one market, time box a rough prototype, or decide you'll run a 30 day fail fast sprint. Put something out into the world. See what happens, normalize failure, and then celebrate the creative successes.