COMPUTERARTS.CREATIVEBLOQ.COMLondon Fashion
Week identity led by
Jody Hudson-Powell
and Luke Powell,
both partners
at Pentagram.EMBRACE YOUR MISTAKES
says. For example, the main reason he’s super-
confident with briefs today is precisely due to a
mistake made in the past, when a book publisher
commissioned him to illustrate four covers.
“It sent over four photographs, and said
that I needed to ‘illustrate the photographs’,”
Redfern recalls. “I assumed that meant creating
illustrations inspired by the photographs. But
there was this little voice in the back of my head
that was going: ‘Are you sure they don’t want you
to use the photographs themselves, and then just
like put stuff into them?’.
You guessed it... when Redfern submitted his
book cover designs, he discovered the voice in
his head had been the correct one. He had
completely misinterpreted the brief, and had
to start over at the last minute. “If I’d asked
that question, I’d have saved myself a hell of a
lot of time, and a lot of work – and I learned a
huge lesson from that,” he says. “Since then,
whenever something on a brief seems unclear,
I don’t hesitate to question it. And I’ve learned
that people like art directors actually appreciate
that; in fact, they often thank me for pointing out
an ambiguity. So in the long run, it’s been really
beneficial that I made that mistake.”
IT’S GOOD TO TALK
But learning from mistakes isn’t always a given,
especially within an agency environment. It
can only happen, believes Scileppi, if there’s an
atmosphere and company culture that encourages
open discussion of things that have gone wrong.
“Leaders and managers of creative teams need
to figure out how they can incorporate reflection
and transparency into the way they manage,”
she argues. “One example would be starting a
one-on-one with an employee by going: ‘Hey,
here’s something that I screwed up myself.’ The
manager needs to show vulnerability first, before
they can expect their employee to be vulnerable.”
Luke Powell, a partner at Pentagram in
London, is also a big believer in creating an
internal culture where errors can be calmly and
rationally discussed. “Mistakes are something
we talk about openly when we do reviews with
people,” he says. “And I think it’s an important
thing to do, to notice these things and give a space
to talk about them. Because actually, people learn
faster and get better when they realise that they’re
not in an oppressive environment that’s going to
judge them for it.”
Aizlewood agrees, and points to the aviation
industry – where discussion of accidents
and disasters is conducted in a blame-free
environment, to better get at the truth and
prevent further catastrophes – as a model to
follow. More specifically, he advocates ritualising
and formalising the process of learning from
mistakes via the retrospective; a mechanism
that’s well-known in the world of agile software
development and is now creeping into the wider
design world.
Retrospectives, also known as retros, are
basically ‘lessons learned’ meetings held at key
stages of a project, in which teams reflect on how
everything’s been going and then decide what
changes they want to make in the next iteration.
“They uncover an incredibly rich tapestry of
understanding and learning that we as an
industry don’t do enough of, and I think that’s
almost criminal,” Aizlewood says. “We have a
mechanism in retros that’s the Holy Grail; it’s the
closest thing to an aircraft’s black box that we‘Mistakes are something
we talk about openly when
we do reviews with people’
LUKE POWELL