Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "Creative Confidence" by Tom & David Kelley

This week we are profiling the Kelley brothers' book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All. Without question, one of the purposes of this site is taking lessons about embracing failure and iteration learned and applied in the creative community and pulling them into mainstream business (while perhaps also reinforcing the ideas to folks in the creative space as well). The Kelleys are perfectly positioned to contribute to this. David Kelley is the founder of the legendary design firm IDEO (creator of products such as the Palm V PDA and Crest's stand-up toothpaste tube) and co-founder of the Stanford d.school. Tom Kelley is a partner at IDEO and teaches at Cal Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Let me first say that Creative Confidence is a handsome book, printed on heavy, glossy magazine-style paper, and including color drawings, pencil sketches, graphics and photographs. It's a book that provides a memorable experience in print - I'd highly recommend you purchase it in that format. I imagine it could be amazing on iPad, but not so much on your Kindle (sorry).

In the book, there is extensive discussion of the role of failure in innovation. Faithful readers of this site will not find much new in this discussion (for example, the vital research of Carol Dweck), but it is a good summary for those exploring the topic.

Creative Confidence has many many tips for improving your own creativity (for example, building "karaoke confidence" - the ability to discount "fear of failure and judgment"), increasing your creative output, and facilitating brainstorming sessions.

Probably the most useful part of the book for me was its take on feedback. It's a vital topic - most negative feedback inhibits people's creativity and innovation, by summarily rejecting many new ideas ("that won't work," "we couldn't do that here"). But positive feedback unbalanced by critique is just as bad, enabling poor projects to linger or allowing promising projects to stray away from a success path.

Feedbackers need to be kind, but also crisp and clear. Feedback recipients need to be open and careful listeners, as well as shrewd editors (some feedback will be off the mark, other will be right on the mark - how to tell the difference is vital). The Kelleys recommend an "I like/I wish" tool for providing feedback, including in a group setting. "I like" is positive things you drew from the prototype/talk/meeting/etc. For example, "I liked how your talk covered the early creation of beer in Mesopotamia. I wish you had brought samples for us to try!"

This advice is superb and indicative of the quality of the book as a whole. Creative Confidence is fun and engaging, and will help you be more creative and innovative if you follow its advice.