A mistake is made somewhere in rural Tanzania. It is not publicized – a donor might be upset. Two years later, the same mistake is repeated in Ghana. 6 months later in Mali. And so the story continues as it has for over 60 years.
A district water officer in rural Malawi has a radical new idea to get communities to invest in repairs. A mid-level bureaucrat at UK’s Department for International Development comes up with a bold plan to change the reporting requirements for one of their grantees. A project officer at an international NGO writes a memo proposing a pilot project that would target only market-ready farmers. But none of them share or execute on their ideas because the failure associated with innovation is not rewarded in development.
By hiding our failures, we are condemning ourselves to repeat them and we are stifling innovation. In doing so, we are condemning ourselves to continue under-performance in the development sector.
Conversely, by admitting our failures – publicly sharing them not as shameful acts, but as important lessons – we contribute to a culture in development where failure is recognized as essential to success.
Donors – large and small – can better understand and support the work they fund. Institutions and individuals can learn more from each other, and test more innovative approaches – and either avoid what’s already been tried or enter into these experiments with eyes wide open.
Competition for financial support in the aid sector has resulted in a ‘worst practice’ – secrecy. This site and those who support it are attempting to correct that error, and create a best practice of openness, transparency and honesty. We’re all in this together. We’re on the same side in the fight against poverty, inequality and unnecessary suffering in too many forms. Let’s admit our failures to find greater successes.
1. Expect failure.
2. Shift organizational accountability from donors to beneficiaries.
3. Fail fast. Fail cheap.
4. Internalize responsibility.
Expect failure. While failing is bad, in complex systems it is often unavoidable. Therefore, turn failure into a systemic expectation in the organization by explicitly stating that learning from it and using it to recognize opportunities for improvement is a crucial part of the work. Daniel Isenberg calls this the need to “accept that failure is a natural part of doing business” (Harvard Business Review April 2011) in order to encourage new ideas, entrepreneurship and innovation. Similarly, Rick Davies suggested this systemic expectation take the form of a minimum level of failure. Support mandated learning by evaluating and managing the effectiveness of a project against desired outcomes rather than simply measuring the completion of activities. In this way project management makes learning on effective approaches to reach outcomes part of the Key Performance Indicators of the project.
Shift organizational accountability from donors to beneficiaries. The accountability paradox of international development, where the project is accountable to its donors and not to the beneficiaries, is a constraint to failing successfully. There are few incentives to identify failures for fear that it could result in disappointing donors and loss of funding. Because of this paradox organizations have become very efficient at fulfilling donor requests. By shifting accountability to beneficiaries, project employees are incentivized to learn from failure to provide effective and relevant projects.
Fail fast. Fail cheap. Failure tends to come with considerable risk – to funding, evaluations, staff reputations and job security. By failing before significant amounts of time and money are invested the consequences of failing are minimized and that risk is greatly reduced. According to IDEO’s Design Thinking approach it is necessary to prototype ideas to test desirability, viability and feasibility with a safe audience at minimal cost. Design Thinking also suggests experiments be easy to build and run and answer a question that will grow the idea. Imagine selecting one aspect of the project and forcing yourself to find a way to test it in less than an hour and at low or no cost. For examples of these experiments in various fields see Tim Brown’s TED Talk.
Internalize responsibility. There is a general human tendency to externalize our failures and pass the blame to other people, processes or the enabling environment unless trained to do otherwise. Ask most people about a time they failed and you will hear answers that include “The timing wasn’t right”, “My boss had other intentions”, “The recession created challenges”, etc. Placing blame on factors outside our control precludes the possibility to examine what we could have done differently and learn from that so as not to repeat our mistakes.