AUGUST 2011 64865 ABOUT THE AUTHOR GALINA VOYTSEHOVSKA How to Discuss Failure—and Not Get Fired! Lessons from a 2011 Human Development is an Operations Officer in the Human Development Network, Education Department (HDNED). She has been with the Bank for over 10 years, Forum Session starting in the country office in Ukraine and later working in the Europe Central Asia region. Any organization can be good at discussing its successes and good practices. Galina was on the World Bank Institute Innovation team But can it be a truly effective agent for learning and change if success is all before joining HDNED. She it discusses? Doesn’t continual learning require being open about mistakes— currently works on ICT, education, and knowledge having the courage to talk about them so they can be corrected and not management issues. repeated? An organization can be more effective if its staff takes individual APPROVING MANAGERS responsibility for creating a culture in which risk taking is not only tolerated Robin Horn, Sector Manager, HDNED; Michael Trucano, Senior but also encouraged, and failure is openly discussed. Some experts ascribe ICT Policy Specialist, HDNED. about 80 percent of the barriers to an organization’s success to issues associated with organizational culture—the way it does business, including how it learns from its mistakes and failures (See Figure 1). Organizations that openly discuss mistakes and shortcomings tend to get better, become more innovative, and have greater impact. The 2011 Human Development Forum featured a FAILFaire1-type session, “How Learning from Failure Can Make Project Success More Likely.� This SmartLesson grew out of staff requests for follow-up information from that session. Background (information and communication technology) and mobiles for development for almost six years and has seen its share of failures. “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street� According to its blog, “For every great project Zig Ziglar that changes how a community benefits from technology to improve the lives of its people, there seem to be twice as many projects that The FAILFaire concept was invented by fail, and end up wasting time, money, and MobileActive,2 a nongovernmental maybe worst, goodwill.� This is why organization (NGO) created to “connect MobileActive published its Guide to Failure, people, organizations, and resources using saying with a great deal of humor: “If you mobile technology for social change.� follow each of the headlines, you are sure to MobileActive has been covering ICT fail.� Below are the headlines: 1 According to “FAILFaire: Learning from #FAILs in ICT and Mobiles for Development,� a Web site found at http://fail- • Don’t Clearly State the Project Objectives faire.org/about/, the program takes a close look at what didn’t work and why projects failed. “We believe that only • Don’t Plan Ahead if we understand what DOESN’T WORK in this field and • Go It Alone stop pushing our failures under the rug, can we collectively learn and get better, more effective, and have greater im- • Don’t Adjust/Don’t Compromise pact as we go forward.� • Ignore the Community 2 MobileActive works with grassroots activists, NGO staff, • Don’t Scale Your Rollout intermediary organizations, content and service providers, and organizations that fund mobile technology projects • Ignore Critics “to create the resources NGOs need to effectively use • Burn Your Budget mobile phones in their work: locally relevant content and services, support and learning opportunities, and networks • Burn Bridges that help MobileActives connect to each other.� See http:// • Don’t Plan for the End www.mobileactive.org/about. SMARTLESSONS — AUGUST 2011 1 MobileActive organized its first FAILFaire event in New “puts others on the spot.� Some also felt that if the York in 2010. Its second FAILFaire session, in July 2010, was information on failure is picked up outside the walls of the hosted by the World Bank Institute’s Innovation Practice, Bank, it can do a lot of harm, especially if taken out of and it spotlighted Information Communication Technology context. So to encourage openness and the sharing of for Development (ICT4D). The event featured presentations information, the team invoked the world-famous Chatham by practitioners who shared 10-minute presentations of House Rule, which says that “participants are free to use ICT4D-related projects that failed, did not meet the the information received, but neither the identity nor the development objectives, or did not make it past the pilot affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other stage. participant, may be revealed.� “Behind the [FAILFaire] events is a Manhattan-based non- The session adopted the following rules: profit group, MobileActive, a network of people and or- ganizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through • The session is completely “off the record�: no filming technology. Its members hope light-hearted examinations or live casting the proceedings, no recording, no of failures will turn into learning experiences—and pre- tweeting, and no blogging. vent others from making the same mistakes.� The New York Times • PowerPoint presentations will not be distributed, either before or after the session, and will not be circulated or posted on the Intranet. The 2011 Human Development Forum Session • Presenters are introduced by their first names and the The overall focus of the 2011 HD Forum was on increasing first letter of the last name (Tim K., John E.), and the human and social capacities and productivity. With that in cover slide has only the presenter’s first name on it. mind, and inspired by the FAILFaire successes, the ICT/ education team in the Bank’s education sector anchor unit • The name of the country can be changed, if needed, to organized its session on “How Learning from Failure Can avoid unnecessary sensitivity. Make Project Success More Likely.� The team wanted to include “failures� from various projects (health, social • People may approach presenters directly if they are protection, education, gender) with the objective of interested in more information. helping task teams learn from the experiences and mistakes of their colleagues. The hope was that open discussions of 2) Obtain the manager’s approval. failures would provide a great learning experience, lessening the likelihood that others would make the same It is important to find out whether discussing failure is mistakes, and increasing the likelihood that future projects within your manager’s comfort zone and, if so, to get his or would be more successful. More generally, the team hoped her approval. The team was lucky to have obtained senior that this session would contribute in a small way to fostering management’s approval for this session to take place. But an environment of increasing openness and knowledge there were indications of sensitivity to the idea of discussing sharing among staff about lessons and experiences that failure. On the main Forum agenda, for example, the title often get “swept under the rug.� of an event changed several times—and the word “failure� disappeared from it several times. A chief economist and A message went out informally to some task team members practice manager opened an event, a sector manager to ask whether they know about “failed� projects. At first, presented, a director attended the session. A number of there was a lot of sensitivity about the word “failure,� and presenters cleared their presentations with their managers it made many people nervous. But as people began to before an event. To avoid additional reputational risk, the understand that there is a safe environment where they can presentations were made on behalf of an individual and discuss their “failed� projects, the excitement started not the organization; presenters talked about projects they growing and more and more brave volunteers began personally were involved in or those they were responsible joining. A few days before the session, the group of for. Some presentations were made by the teams. presenters included 10 people, not counting managers and staff who made introductory remarks. More than 100 Bank staff attended the session. “There are no failures – just experiences and your reaction to them� “Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up� Tom Krause Chinese Proverb 3) Engage the audience. Lessons Learned To enhance the learning experience, the audience has to be 1) Create a safe space. engaged in the process—especially when there is no time allotted for questions and answers. We did not allow time for Creating a safe space for presenters and the audience was Q&A for two reasons: One was simply to save time—we had one of the necessary conditions for a session to take place. only an hour and a half for 10 presenters. The other was to Initially, some presenters felt that calling a project a failure avoid a lengthy discussion with audience participants, for 2 SMARTLESSONS — AUGUST 2011 fear that they might name names or assign blame in their 5) Make it a learning event. questions. We asked for short “ignite style� presentations. To compensate for the lack of a Q&A session, we introduced The projects discussed at the session were not total failures. voting by interactive-response devices, commonly known as Some of them suffered from project aspects that were “clickers,� and asked the audience questions. The voting underestimated, some from incorrect decisions, and some took place between presentations. Below are some examples from lack of sustainability. Some projects took off only of the questions: after they were redesigned. Others showed a lack of results. One way or another, each of them had a number • Which lesson from this project example resonated with of lessons that a person responsible was asked to share. you the most? One of the presenters said, “I decided to make a presentation to show that a project considered a failure • Which “failure� or mistake identified here have you was actually not a failure at all.� experienced in one of your projects? As one presentation followed another, it became more • What surprised you most in this project example? and more apparent that there is a lot of similarity in the problems that the projects faced. • Were these “failures� specific to the context of this sector or country, or are they likely to be found more After the session, with many people asking for widely? presentations, we suggested that they approach the presenters individually for more information. Some people Finally, we asked the audience to vote for the “finest wrote to us after the session, asking for copies of failure.� General voting and the recognition of a winner presentations. In some cases, with agreement from the took place at the end of the session. We also included presenter, we released the name and contact information inspirational “failure� quotes and distributed handouts of to the interested staff for further discussion. Most of the additional resources, such as a failure checklist based on the presenters, though, were not in favor of the idea. To keep presentation, “Policy Failures: Why things go wrong� by our promise to the presenters on the one hand and still Billy Hamilton and Jody Kusek. make the substance of the lessons available, we reviewed the content of the “takeaway messages� slides (Slide No. 4) Manage time—and mean it! 5) from all 10 presentations, and extracted six pieces of advice: We created templates of the following five slides and asked the presenters to prepare them in PowerPoint • Don’t make things too complex or too ambitious. format: • Make a sound risk/challenge/political economy analysis. “Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great • Create an appropriate institutional setting in the client responsibilites� country. Napoleon Hill • Ensure ownership/capacity of local implementers/ users. Slide 1: Cover slide, the name of the presentation (for example, “Everything you always wanted to know about • Come with good specialists and equipment (notably ‘failed’ projects but were afraid to ask�). when technology matters). Slide 2: Details of the project—what, where, when. • Build in “protecting� and good management mechanisms. Slide 3: What you were trying to do, what the objectives were. Conclusion Slide 4: What “failed,� why it went wrong. “Failure is not a single cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment Slide 5: What you would do differently next time, what repeated everyday� takeaway message you would like to give to the audience. Chinese Proverb We gave each presenter seven minutes to share lessons about her or his project, and we programmed the slides to When an organization tries to become a learning change every 60 seconds. (This did not work very well, organization and tries to innovate, one possible outcome is because most people needed either less or more time to a failure, a mistake, or simply a lack of good results. Is your cover the slide content.) A gong sounded at the end of organization or unit constantly learning from good and seven minutes. Unfortunately, some presenters went well “bad� practices? Or, are staff making the same mistakes over the time limit, even though the gong sounded more and reinventing the wheel? If the latter is true, your than once. We also used an iPad with a stopwatch visible to organization may need to change its culture. It’s the only all presenters. way an organization can progress, innovate, and learn. The SMARTLESSONS — AUGUST 2011 3 Figure 1: Polling Results for Having Another FAILFaire Event Dutch Institute of Brilliant Failures has source of inspiration for others. In this respect instituted a new Transparency Award in the failure is not only an option but failure is also Development Aid Sector, explaining, “Time necessary.� How did we measure our own and time again history has shown us that our success? At the end of the 2011 Forum session, most valuable experiences are more likely to we asked the audience whether the Bank come from mistakes than from successes. We should program another event of this type. learn from our failures, and our failures are a Figure 1 shows the results. DISCLAIMER SmartLessons is an awards program to share lessons learned in development-oriented advisory services and investment operations. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of IFC or its partner organizations, the Executive Directors of The World Bank or the governments they represent. 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