“All my successes have been built on my failures.” – Benjamin Disraeli

The development community is failing… to learn from failure. Instead of recognizing these experiences as learning opportunities, we hide them away out of fear and embarrassment.

No more. This site is an open space for development professionals who recognize that the only “bad” failure is one that’s repeated. Those who are willing to share their missteps to ensure they don’t happen again. It is a community and a resource, all designed to establish new levels of transparency, collaboration, and innovation within the development sector.

Get involved – share failures, build knowledge and encourage others to do the same – so we all benefit, today.

tales from the hood

The 2nd Aid Blog Forum: Admitting Aid Failure?

There are increasing demands for [development practitioners] to talk in meaningful, less simplistic and less universally rosy terms about what we accomplish.

Increasingly we’re being asked to talk about our failures. So, what do you think?

Join the Tales from the Hood Aid Blog Forum discussion.
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IBF

The Brilliant Failure Award 2011

October 13, 2011 the winners of the Brilliant Failures award were announced in Amsterdam.

The goal of the Brilliant Failures award in the International Development sector is to promote learning possibilities and the power of innovation and transparency within the sector. In practice, projects can play out completely differently than expected. And that is okay, as long as the people and organizations involved learn from their mistakes.
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spot a failure

Why Success Always Starts With Failure

Sarah Rapp builds on an interview with Tim Harford and writes a fantastic post for the 99 Percent conference ‘Tips’ blog entitled Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

She offers insights into how NOT to react to failure, key steps to recognize and adapt to failure and the necessity of creating a safe space to fail.

Image: From Harford’s “Adapt” book trailer
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hoover dam

Failure in the News

Learning from failure is showing up in the media in a big way.

Want to catch up on what the experts are saying on the topic?

Bill Brantley shares his thoughts on “big project” failure and innovation, Ned Breslin calls to move the transparency discussion beyond “showing where money goes to what it actually does over time.” and Ian Smillie and Scott Gilmore talk about the challenges of admitting and learning from failures in the development sector.
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SSIReview

Stanford Social Innovation Review: Thriving on Failure

It seemed like a smart idea when four nonprofits with a shared focus on climate change came together to build an online platform for grassroots organizing. They had financial resources, passion, technical expertise, and time to devote to the project. …
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TEDx

Learning from Failure at TEDx

Founder of Engineers Without Borders Calgary, David Damberger, discusses “Learning From Failure” at TEDxYYC 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGiHU-agsGY
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IMG_2179

Four Ideas for Failing Successfully

1. Explicitly state that, while failing is bad, in complex systems it is often unavoidable. Therefore set the expectation that learning from failure is a part of the work.
2. To provide incentives to constantly improve, organizations need to be accountable to project beneficiaries, not donors.
3. Fail fast and fail cheap in order to minimize the risk associated with failure.
4. Take responsibility for failures. Externalizing the blame eliminates the chance to learn what YOU could have done differently.
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CulturalRevolution.StruggleSession

PDT’s Failure Report 1.0

As I wrote earlier this month, PDT will be issuing an organization-wide failure report early next year along the lines of those provided by Engineers Without Borders. We are still refining the guidelines. Inspired by Cornell West, who asked “Yes it’s failure, but how good a failure?, we want a template that focuses on learning from these mistakes. So, in the spirit of failing well, I’ve chosen to draft our first report from the perspective of PDT’s management.
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BushOnFinancialCrisis_FAIL

Why It’s Hard to Believe in Failure

There is an often quoted statistic that is similar in many western economies that about 75% of the businesses fail in the first two years from their start up.  What this statistic says is not that western businesses are incompetent, …
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Charity Ngoma helps launch AdmittingFailure.com

Launch of Admitting Failures

On the evening of Friday, January 14, Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) — along with development thinker Ian Smillie, Executive Director of Peace Dividend Trust Scott Gilmore, and Charity Ngoma from PROFIT Zambia — publicly launched a new website “admittingfailure.com” and made a bold challenge to development charities across Canada and around the world: stop fearing failure, start innovating, start an honest conversation about mistakes.
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