Freedom to Fail

OK, so sometimes it doesn’t work out…

We’re here at the BBC, wrapping up our week in Manchester.

Next week we’re with The BBC in London.

We’re with the Drama and Comedy unit. The same folks who produce shows like The Office, which will be familiar to Americans, at least.

It actually started here.

(No, seriously).

And the BBC one is better (at least I think so).

In any event, the folks we’re working with are producers and directors from The BBC, one of the greatest broadcasters in the world.

This is not just about learning how to shoot and cut, but really more about changing the way that people in the industry think.

For all of its history, television has been both a complicated and expensive process.

Complicated to make.

Expensive to make.

As a result, people in the industry have been nervous and very cautious. Perhaps properly so. If you were about to commit to spending millions of pounds (or dollars) to green-light a series, then you had better be sure it will work.

One of the very best ways to make sure it will work is to simply mimic something that has been successful before.

That’s why you get Supernanny followed by Nanny 911, or about a dozen Britain’s Got Talent shows.

Or an American version of the already successful and proven The Office, done by Ricky Gervais in the UK.

When I first started to work in television, my boss told me ‘television is imitative, not creative’.  Good start.

Well this is no longer the case.

If it’s just you and your camera and your laptop, all it takes to create something is an idea and your time.

(and of course the skills you have learned at NYVS.com!)

So here at The BBC, which is a magnet for creative television people in Britain, we have spent the week with a room full of creative people who have been, for most of their careers, largely truncated in their creative freedom.  They have been truncated because the medium in which they worked – television, was thought to be complicated and expensive.

It was once.

It isn’t any more.

If you have an idea – well, there is here is a camera and there is the door – go make it.

You don’t need a ‘craft cameraman’, a ‘craft editor’, a director, a producer, a written proposal, a script, a treatment, or a meeting (or 100 of them) to get ‘approval’.

And you know what? You can make a mistake.

You can make a mistake and not risk your job or your career.

In fact, I urge you to make a mistake.

I urge you to fail.

Often.

Because creativity requires the freedom to fail, over and over, until you get it right.

If you live in a world in which you can’t fail without being fired, then you will make damned sure you never fail,

And if you never fail, it means you will never take a risk.

And if you never take a risk, you will never push your creativity to places it has not been before.

So the hardest job here is not so much teaching people to push the right buttons.

That’s 10% of what we are doing.

The other 90% is creativity.

And giving people the freedome to make mistakes without fear.

And to try again.. and again.