Why Taking Risks Is Critical for Creativity

Let’s take a trip to your local park or playground. I’d like to invite you to take a seat on the bench nearest a concentration of playground equipment: slides, swings, jungle gyms, seesaws, merry-go-rounds, sandboxes, trapeze rings, and a maze or two. Sit quietly and listen to some of the sounds—most of which are coming from the mouths of parents: “Don’t climb up there; you’re going to get hurt,” “No, you can’t go all the way to the top. It’s too dangerous,” and “How many times have I told you not to push your sister so hard? She could get injured.”

Now, let’s take a trip to England and sit near one of the playgrounds in the suburbs of London. Look around, and you’ll see something quite different (yes, you’ll still hear parents shouting at their children). But here, the playground equipment is a little edgier, a little more “dangerous.” You’ll see taller climbing poles, higher slides, and faster merry-go-rounds. This new equipment is in response to playground environments that are viewed as being just a little too safe. “Playgrounds [in England] are being toughened up because a generation of children is failing to learn how to handle risk,” according to this article.

Apparently, Britain’s embrace of a risk-averse culture goes far beyond the creation of safe playgrounds. The American Management Association, a nonprofit organization, is so concerned about England’s low tolerance for risk that it has established a special commission to examine what it perceives to be a critical issue in the overall health of the country. “It is forgotten that risk can be a good thing,” the group writes in an overview of its mission. “People often make an active choice to take a risk because they see a potential opportunity to reap rewards. Risk is the essence of many creative projects and can be about daring to do something new or different, or taking a chance, in the hope of securing benefits.”

We know that taking risks is essential in our overall growth and development. We all took some risks when we learned how to walk. By the same token, we took a risk when we got our driver’s license and took the family car out for a spin, and many of us took a risk when we joined up with another individual and said that we would spend the rest of our life with this person (“Till death do us part”).

I think we can all agree that taking risks is an essential element in our learning curve. Yet, what we practice in the corporate world is often altogether different. It’s similar to the way parents “monitor” their children on a playground—“Don’t do that, or you might get hurt.”

Minimize the risk, and you can minimize the potential hurt. But what results is often stunted creative expression. Innovation is all about taking a chance, all about venturing into unfamiliar territories with the possibility of discovering something new or something different. That’s not possible without some risk-taking.

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An aversion to risk-taking

“Playing it safe” or “same old, same old” is the way many companies minimize loss by limiting risk-taking. When you don’t take a risk, you systematically avoid making mistakes. And lots of mistakes cost lots of money. It’s much easier and less risky to do things the way they’ve always been done in the past. “It was proven successful, then surely it must be equally successful now. Why change?”

This certainly makes sense from a logical standpoint, but it places unnatural hurdles in the way of creative progress. It restricts the generation and implementation of creative ideas—new ideas essential to progress. When we adhere to the same routines and standards used in the past, we prevent innovation, and we restrict creativity. In short, if employees are forced to stay within existing mental boundaries, they will be less inclined to move beyond those practices… and less inclined to exercise their creative powers.

When companies kill creativity, they devalue risk-taking as an opportunity for employees to try something new. Often those new ideas fail, but even those failures offer unique opportunities to see what doesn’t work, what can be learned from those failures, and how those failures might influence the development of future ideas. “If you punish employees that don’t immediately deliver amazing results through their innovations, then you will teach staff members to be afraid of creativity and stifle future voices that could improve your company. Instead, encourage people to learn from their mistakes, and reward them for being open about their failures and mistakes to ensure that future issues aren’t swept under the carpet.”

An aversion to risk-taking also has another consequence: a tendency to micro-manage an organization. A close and careful monitoring of every aspect of a company, in logic, keeps a “handle” on what is happening and how well it is happening. But it also has a negative impact on creative advancement.

Creativity involves the freedom to move into uncharted territories and unfamiliar vistas. When workers feel that someone is “looking over their shoulder,” they are less inclined to venture into unknown spheres or expanses. They are less inclined to come up with a new craft, a new direction, or a new map that opens up creative vistas. They feel constrained, not only in what they do but, more importantly, in what they could do. Their creative spirit is manacled, and their sails sufficiently trimmed such that they seldom venture outside their safe harbor and into uncharted seas.