Find your beauty in broken things - kintsugi, personal growth and business growth
Recently, I've become fascinated with the concept of kintsugi - the Japanese art of repairing broken objects. While I've never physically practised it (I'm not sure my hand is steady enough), I love the idea of it.
The craft relishes attention to detail and a meticulous approach. In kintsugi, urushi is used to stick pieces of broken pot or glass. Urushi is a honey-textured lacquer painstakingly made from the sap of a tree. The sap takes up to five years from harvesting to maturity when it's used on the finest bowls and Japanese boxes. It only dries at a temperature between 25 and 30C and in a very specific humidity range.
When dry, it's sanded down finely and, often, gold is dusted over the lacquer.
The result is a new object of beauty. A beauty which shows its scars proudly. It's a beauty which follows the Japanese thought of wabi-sabi - which accepts and embraces imperfection; it delights in the inconsistency of human endeavour.
How does kintsugi apply to marketing?
I believe these principles are valuable in my chosen discipline of marketing, but also in our general lives in business and, indeed, beyond.
Marketing and growth are about recognising and understanding flaws and failures. Just as you can't have a perfect round of golf until you shoot 18, you can't have a perfect marketing campaign until every person buys.
Someone much wiser than me once said that walking was simply a series of controlled falls. Marketing is a lot like that. We execute a campaign, we AB test elements within the campaign, we learn from the successes but we learn much more from the failures.
In an interview for a marketer, you can ask about the interviewee's best campaign, but you'll learn much more if you ask them about their worst. What went wrong? What did they learn from it? How did they apply that learning to the next campaign?
> Covering-up the cracks, hiding your errors, not recognising your mistakes, are all deadly traits as a marketer.
It's important to put processes in place which enable growth and marketing teams to recognise, highlight and report on campaign and growth experiment activity. That requires understanding what you're testing in the first place, before you even begin the campaign.
I'm an advocate for growth meetings where, every week, the team reviews activity and uses learnings to plan the next week's work. Every week we're testing new hypotheses, learning more about what works and what doesn't work.
Here's an example: We wanted to make incremental improvements to a customer referral program.
It was going OK, but we wanted more. So we set-out a bunch of hypotheses.
- If we increase the value of the award to the referrer, we'll see higher growth
- If we increase the value of the award to the referred customer, we'll see higher growth
- If we do both, we'll see even higher growth but it will probably be at too high a cost
Then, from nowhere, my CEO said "maybe we should change the wording from 'refer a friend' to 'nominate a friend', I think that will have a higher uptake".
We tried them all. Our hypotheses around the value of the award were all correct but didn't really move the needle. Reluctantly, I tried the language change. Bang! Double-digit improvement followed the next week.
My mistakes? I was a bit too proud to think the CEO had better marketing ideas than me. I also naively thought that the language was less important than the cash.
My learnings? Listen more to other people's ideas. And never underestimate the power of language!
Sometimes, junior marketers struggle with admitting to mistakes in public. But sometimes, senior marketers in large teams can also really struggle. I think this is partly because of a misplaced sense of career competition. However, if everyone embraces the concept of kintsugi, I believe you'll build resilience and growth quickly.
What can we learn from kintsugi for business - and for personal growth?
Well, really the same goes for business as for marketing. The business leaders I admire the most are those who understand and admit their mistakes - they even celebrate them. No one gets every call right, every time. Check-out Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph on LinkedIn for some fairly honest appraisals of his personal and business growth, as a great example.
Most successful businesses have made mistakes and learnt from them (even if they call it 'pivoting'). Actually, 'pivot' is a great example of a misunderstood word. For many it implies that the previous idea was a failure. But to pivot is to turn or rotate, like a hinge. Crucially, you pivot around a fulcrum - the original core of your idea is that fulcrum, the centre of your universe. You're just trying from a different angle.
Hopefully, you learnt lots from the first angle which you can then take on to your next approach, post pivot.
The ability to find beauty in broken things helps us personally too. Another Japanese concept is mushin - the idea of a mental flow which frees us from anxiety, particularly the anxiety of change. In fact, some practitioners the art of kintsugi to help their mushin.
I'm not advocating for us to all learn Japanese martial arts or to become meditators, but I think there is a lot we can learn from identifying, understanding and appreciating our own flaws. For many of us, the biggest cause of anxiety is the fear of failure.
I'll be honest, I don't know that much about kintsugi. I've read a few articles, looked at some lovely images and thought I like the idea. This could be a massive failure - I could have inadvertently caused cultural offence and will get a huge backlash. But that isn't stopping me from publishing this article.
If it does happen, I'll learn from it and I'll move on.
We are the product of what has come before in our lives - and recognising our flaws will help us build a better, more beautiful future us.
I can't promise to mend all your cracks or to dust them with gold, but I can help you recognise flaws put you on the path to growth.