Flexibility of failure in creative projects? Insights from music productions and scientific explorations

Failure is commonly defined as disappointed expectations or the cessation of operations. But how do we think of failure in creative and scientific settings in which expectations are uncertain, shift and change, and which feature trial and error sequences? This short paper sets out to explore the various dimensions of failure in creative fields by looking at scientific explorations and music productions. Based on interviews with scientists and research managers as well as musicians and music producers about their creative processes and two case studies, in which follow a particular project over three years, we develop an understanding of failure that highlights its multi-dimensionality and relativity. Based on an advanced understanding of creativity as 'idea work', i.e., connecting and legitimizing various ideas into a focal project, we thus understand failure as the disentanglement of different process-strands, whereas their inter-wovenness keeps the creative process going. We aim to contribute to existing definitions of failure as disappointed expectation or cessation of operations (e.g., Shepard et al., 2017; Habersang et al., 2019) by providing a more nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness and dynamics of different failure dimensions involved in creative processes.