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and his colleagues could sometimes cure a phobia that has lasted a lifetime in less than a day.

      First, Bandura tells phobic people that there is a snake in the room next door and that they are going in there—to which the typical response is “Like hell I am.”

      Next, he leads them through a long sequence of challenges, tailoring each subsequent step to be just within reach. For example, at one point, he has them look through a one-way mirror at a man holding the snake and asks, “What do you think this thing will do?” People with phobias are convinced the snake will wrap itself around the man’s neck and choke him. But contrary to their beliefs, the snake just dangles lazily without choking or constricting at all.

      And so it continues. Further along, Bandura asks them to stand at the open door of the room with the snake inside. If that step is too scary, he offers to stand with them at the door.

      Many small steps later, eventually they are right there next to the snake. By the end of the session, people touch the snake. And just like that, their phobia is gone.

      When Bandura began using this technique, he checked back with people months later and found that the phobia stayed gone, too. One woman even recounted a dream about a boa constrictor that helped her wash the dishes, instead of terrorizing her like the snakes in the nightmares she used to have.

      Bandura calls the methodology he uses to cure phobias “guided mastery.”

      The process of guided mastery draws on the power of firsthand experience to remove false beliefs. It incorporates psychology tools like vicarious learning, social persuasion, and graduated tasks. Along the way, it helps people confront a major fear and dispel it one small, manageable step at a time.

      This discovery—that guided mastery can cure a lifelong phobia in a short time—was a big deal. But Bandura discovered something even more meaningful during his follow-up interviews with the former phobics.

      The interviews brought to light some surprising side effects. People mentioned other changes in their lives, changes seemingly unrelated to their phobias: they’d taken up horseback riding, they’d become fearless public speakers, they were exploring new possibilities in their jobs. The dramatic experience of overcoming a phobia that had plagued them for decades—a phobia they had expected to live with for the rest of their lives—had altered their belief system about their own ability to change. It had altered their belief in what they could accomplish. Ultimately, it transformed their lives.

      This newfound courage, exhibited by the same people who once had to wear hockey masks to get near a snake, led Bandura to pivot toward a new line of research: how people come to believe that they can change a situation and accomplish what they set out to do in the world.

      Since then, Bandura’s research has shown that when people have this belief, they undertake tougher challenges, persevere longer, and are more resilient in the face of obstacles and failure. Bandura calls this belief “self-efficacy.”

      Bandura’s work scientifically validates something we’ve been seeing for years: Doubts in one’s creative ability can be cured by guiding people through a series of small successes. And the experience can have a powerful effect on the rest of their lives.

      The state of mind Bandura calls self-efficacy is closely related to what we think of as creative confidence.

      People who have creative confidence make better choices, set off more easily in new directions, and are better able to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They see new possibilities and collaborate with others to improve the situations around them. And they approach challenges with newfound courage.

      But to gain this creative, empowered mindset, sometimes you have to touch the snake.

      In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.

       THE FAILURE PARADOX

      A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail. Yet according to Professor Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, the opposite is actually true: creative geniuses, from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quite prolific when it comes to failure—they just don’t let that stop them. His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments. Their ultimate “strokes of genius” don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period. They take more shots at the goal. That is the surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.

      Take Thomas Edison, for example.

      Edison, one of the most famous and prolific inventors in history, had failure baked into his creative process. He understood that an experiment ending in failure is not a failed experiment—as long as constructive learning is gained. He invented the incandescent lightbulb, but only after the lessons of a thousand unsuccessful attempts. Edison maintained that the “real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.”

      In fact, early failure can be crucial to success in innovation. Because the faster you find weaknesses during an innovation cycle, the faster you can improve what needs fixing. We grew up in Ohio, home of aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The Wright brothers are best remembered for what is sometimes called the “first flight,” in December of 1903 at Kitty Hawk. But the focus on that accomplishment overlooks the hundreds of experiments and failed flight trials in the years that led up to that first successful flight. In fact, some reports suggest that the Wright brothers picked Kitty Hawk in part because the remote Outer Banks location would draw less media attention during their experiments.

      The surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.

      Edison and the Wright brothers may seem like ancient history, but the tradition of learning from enlightened trial and error is still very much alive today. When Steelcase decided to reinvent the traditional classroom chair—eclipsing that uncomfortable wooden version with the writing surface rigidly attached to the chair arm—they worked with our design team to build over two hundred prototypes in all shapes and sizes. Early on, they experimented with small paper-and-Scotch-tape models. Later in the project, they constructed plywood components, attaching them to pieces of existing chairs. They went to local colleges, asking students and professors to interact with these “experience models” and give feedback. They carved shapes out of foam and fabricated parts on 3D printers to get a sense of shape and size. They prototyped mechanisms in steel. And as release to manufacturing approached, they built sophisticated full-size models that looked exactly like the real thing. All that relentless experimentation—and the associated learning—paid off. The Node chair replaced the rigidity of its predecessors with a comfortable swivel seat, an adjustable work surface, casters for maneuverability, and a tripod base to hold backpacks. The result is a mobile, flexible twenty-first-century classroom chair that quickly transitions from lecture-based seating to group activities, fitting with today’s varied teaching styles. Launched in 2010, Node chairs are already in use at eight hundred schools and universities around the world.

      Neither Edison nor the Wright brothers nor modern-day innovators like the design team on the Node chair were defensive or embarrassed about their method of trial and error. Ask seasoned innovators and they will likely have an impressive collection of “war stories” about failures on their path toward success.

       DESIGNING FOR COURAGE

      Albert Bandura used the process of guided mastery—a series of small successes—to help people gain courage and overcome deep-seated phobias. What would have been nearly impossible to accomplish in one giant leap became manageable in small steps, with the guidance of someone knowledgeable in the field. In a similar

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