Over the years, there’s been much discussion and attempts to get organisations and programmes to talk about ‘failures’ – things that are not working or situations where we made wrong calls.
You wouldn’t think this is so difficult given we all know that in international development, like in any other sector (or, generally in life!) things don’t necessarily work as we expect or assume. This is hardly a secret to anyone. But given the incentives in the sector to try to secure the next round of funding, we still tend to focus solely or mainly on what worked and where we succeeded.
Of course, there are some excellent examples and organisations that are ahead of the game. For instance, after publishing some Failure Reports, Engineers Without Borders Canada launched the Admitting Failure website where aid organisations can post their failed ventures. They felt this was needed as ‘fear, embarrassment, and intolerance of failure drives our learning underground and hinders innovation’.
There’s also been several Fail Festivals around the globe. Their aim is getting rid of the stigma of the ‘F-word’ and see it as a force for change.
But how to encourage learning from failures on a smaller scale? How to do it in a programme or consortia with multiple partners?
As a solution, we often talk about creating safe spaces for honest reflection and incentivising learning. But it can be difficult to come up with concrete actions to encourage sharing on what hasn’t worked between teams or partners who often are – let’s be honest – competitors outside of a particular project.
