Thu 6 Oct 2011
At what scale can we fail?
Posted by Ed under development, Development Institutions, policy, research
[10] Comments
I am a big fan of the idea of admitting failure and trying to learn from it. I like ambitious projects with potentially huge payoffs, but a lot of risk of failure – they’re just much more interesting than going at things incrementally. Besides, if you are going to fail, why not fail spectacularly? As I tell my grad students, if you are going to ride it all the way to the ground, you might as well dig a big hole when you get there. At least people will notice the hole, and try to figure out what the hell you were up to . . . of course, I am an academic (with tenure), so I have a pretty big cushion to land on these days.
All that said, I wonder about the utility of these admitting failure efforts that I see coming from groups like Engineers without Borders. I had the good fortune to catch up with Tom Murphy (or, as the twitterati know him, @viewfromthecave) the other day while he was here in DC, and we started talking about learning from failure. In the course of our conversation, we came around to two key problems. First, really admitting failure requires reframing the public image of development as an inherently do-no-harm effort, where just doing something is better than nothing. Second, given this first problem, when we really start talking about what failure means, even in the most constructive of settings, we will call the entire development enterprise into question. How do we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
We have long allowed ourselves and our donor constituencies to believe that development work should never have bad outcomes – there is a pervasive belief (under challenge right now, at least by some) that, at worst, a failed project will not change anything – that is what development failure means. Of course, this is simply untrue – development efforts can make things much, much worse for people if they are poorly framed, designed, and implemented – a point I try to make in Delivering Development. This has a lot to do with the very imagery of a helpless and oppressed global poor the aid world relies upon to raise funds. When people see someone in a situation that difficult, they assume things could not get worse. There is no discussion of what is working in the lives of the poor, and therefore the public has little sense that there are fragile things in peoples’ lives and livelihoods that should be protected as we bring new programs and projects to ground. As a result, development takes on the image of a low-risk enterprise in which social protection and “do no harm” safeguards are superfluous, as the worst we could do is leave people as they were.
Up against that worldview, admitting failure seems just fine – “hey, we didn’t really move the needle with that project, but we’ll figure out what we did wrong and try again” sounds much better than “we are incredibly sorry for utterly devastating the physical basis of your livelihoods and forcing many of you to abandon your farms because we ignored your existing land management practices.” Unfortunately, admitting failure means a lot of the latter, and I am not at all convinced that anyone has the stomach to really wade into that.
This issue has to be combined with a concern for the scale of failure. It is all well and good to admit failure, even ugly failures, at the project level – stuff happens. A failed project can usually be traced to concrete causes that can then be addressed and remedied. But how can a bilateral aid agency, or even a multilateral agency, do the same for its programs? It is one thing for such huge organizations to talk about the failure of individual projects, and learn from them, but how can we talk about learning from entire programs that don’t live up to expectations without attracting serious challenges to the aid budget that end up wrecking even successful programs, or preventing the scale-up of things that we know work? Put another way, how can we create an environment where learning from our activities is truly possible, and balance that environment with the political reality of aid agencies and NGOs that answer to (different) constituencies that expect only good things to happen?
This framing of global poverty, and the persistent need to justify aid budgets, puts everyone involved with development on a terrible tightrope – at least for those of us interested in evidence-based programming and policy. Just saying that admitting failure is good does not begin to get us to a world in which we can see that as more than a slogan. We will have to unwind decades of public relations and fundraising practice, and back out of some very long-standing and pervasive views of global poverty, before we have any real hope of bringing real learning to the fore of development practice.
Or, we could just give everyone tenure . . .
10 Responses to “ At what scale can we fail? ”
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Nice article, one addition though: even successful programs or projects can have winners and losers. Even for successful projects, we will have to account for losers.
Empowering one group (e.g. giving them access to fair trade) sidelines the small traders now bypassed, and so many other examples.
Great point! I’ve made exactly this argument in the context of adaptation, that there are always winners and losers for whose experiences we must take account. That said, the status quo for most livelihoods anywhere in the world results in winners and losers, so it is not that we are shifting from a win-win world to a winners and losers world, but shifting from one world of winners and losers to another world of winners and losers. The question, then, is who wins and loses, and how those terms are understood in the context of our programs – there is no way around these two tightly linked issues.
How much do you think discussions about failure in the development sector will lead or lag the issue in wider public policy debates?
I’m reminded of a couple of recent comments. J from Tales from the Hood bemoaning the “dumbassery” of many approaches to aid, and a commenter reasonably pointing out that it’s hardly a feature unique to aid; much debate on public policy for the West is at similarly low levels. Tim Harford makes a similar point when talking about his book Adapt and the reluctance of Western politicians or policy-makers to admit they got things wrong (and to admit that they probably will in future too).
Great question, and one for which I don’t have a great answer. Your point is a good one – this sort of thing is not unique to development. I have argued (in academic settings) that development is the area of intellectual inquiry most resistant to empirical evidence . . . and that may be true at the level of fundamental assumptions (i.e. economic growth is the core of all successful development). However, all public policy areas have their bad assumptions, and all political actors have to deal with odd stresses and institutional contexts that often promote problematic behaviors. I guess I still believe that we can change this sort of behavior and culture if we can get a few charismatic, visible individuals to own failure, learn from it and do better the next time such that people appreciate that process . . . basically, do all of this in a manner that people can relate to in their own lives (as everyone fails and learns – at least I hope they do) and people will appreciate the transparency, relate to the experience, and come out supporting the effort.
I could, of course, be terribly naive in this . . .
Great post!
There is so much here to discuss but I will try to focus on a couple key points I think are REALLY important about the Admitting Failure movement/trend: How to admit failure and what the general public will think.
First of all, the idea is to actually avoid “spectacular” failure. Yes, take risks, test the unknown, but do so prepared for failure so it can be recognized early and the learning resulting from it can be used to make modifications as and continuously improve as you go.
Ideally, by admitting failure you never get to the point of “devastating the physical basis of…livelihoods” because the implementers went in with humility and openness to adjust their project to local conditions as they learned what worked and what didn’t. AND they operated under a system which allowed them to voice concerns and admit failure before it became spectacular.
Now I come to the other key issue, the one of public support for the development sector if we start talking about failures.
I agree, the messaging around development needs to change. Easier said than done but I really believe the public can handle more complex messaging (and possibly are getting sick of being lied to with the ‘all successes all the time’ stuff).
International development work isn’t always successful but it also does serve a valuable role in helping to alleviate poverty. Admitting Failure as a movement is about recognizing reality lies between the extremes and “reframing the public image of development” to accept that the problem of global poverty is so complex there are bound to be elements of successes and failures in every action that is taken in the effort to solve it. Honestly, I think the general public is more than capable of understanding this reality.
This understanding focuses public support on organizations that are learning from their failures and improving their effectiveness not the ones that claim they have this poverty thing figured out and never fail.
Basically, for any size of project or organization anywhere working at any level, I would argue having learning as an expectation and objective and rewarding people for trying new approaches to old problems, regardless of the outcome, leads to more effective development. The public will value the risk-takers and innovators – those humble and curious people who experiment with different solutions to wicked problems and yes, admit and learn from failure when it happens.
I agree with all of your points – what you describe is, in effect, the adaptive management of a project as it goes into implementation. If done actively and aggressively, I agree that capturing failure should avert the “really giant crater” that results when you blow up someone’s livelihood or agroecology. For whatever reason, though, I don’t see this sort of constant, aggressive adaptive management actually happening in implementation – instead, implementation happens and we start learning lessons afterward. The potential for a huge crater shoots up under these circumstances . . .
Yes, we must stop with the “success all the time” reporting – the public is clearly going to have trouble with the cognitive dissonance that stems from hearing that development works, and seeing fundraising ads with starving, dirty children that seem to suggest that development is not, in fact, working. I like your proposed reframing – and I wonder, would it not be worth enlisting some big names from the startup world? The failure rate there is huge . . . and it can actually be easier to raise money for a new startup after you fail, because there is an assumption in that community that someone who failed before probably learned something, and won’t make the same mistakes. Given the capitalist focus of our economy and society, those voices might carry tremendous weight.