FAILFaire

A few months ago, we noted that we had been hearing buzz and feedback in the news about the FailFaire concept, and had caught wind of the format taking hold among new industries (in addition to our own focus, which is technology and international development).

While our original FailFaire events were inter-organizational and we invited a range of practitioners and organizations in the field, the concept is also well suited as an intra-organizational exercise. Hosting a private internal FailFaire can be helpful for honestly reviewing past performance, better sharing lessons learned, building capacity, and brainstorming solutions to prevent the same mistakes from being made again within your individual organization’s internal framework.

In this vein, we’ve heard that the World Bank, UNICEF and Ashoka, an organization focused on supporting and promoting social-entrepreneurship worldwide, have all hosted their own variations of internal FailFaires.

At Ashoka’s event in November, nearly 50 people attended in person, and many international staff from around the world called in. Our friends who helped put on the event reported that it was a huge hit, and people are already requesting another one next year. Ashoka’s Human Resources team is encouraging staffers and country offices to host their own variations of the internal event within their own teams.

While the specific takeaways and failed projects which were presented are, naturally, only available internally – you can read a roundup blogpost about their event here.

And, if you are inspired to host your own, check out our how-to guide to creating a killer FailFaire as a primer.

We’re not the only ones talking about M4D and ICT4D fails! We were thrilled to learn that the Dutch Institute for Brilliant Failures (yes, it’s a real organization – devoted to highlighting the importance of experimentation and failure in progress in innovation) recently instated a new prize specifically for the development aid sector in 2010.

As it turns out, our good friends at Text To Change recently won the distinct honor of an Audience Award for their first HIV/AIDS text message quiz program in Uganda! We asked Josette de Vroeg from Text To Change’s office in the Netherlands, to explain:

Q: What is the Institute of Brilliant Failures, and what is the new Transparency Award in the Development Aid Sector?

The goal of the Institute of Brilliant Failures is to bring about a shift in the way we view failure – to promote a positive view of failure through the use of stories, film, interactive workshops, and road shows. The institute is a tribute to inventors and those who had the courage to try something different, and a way of laying down a challenge for the rest of us.

After lots of criticism on development aid the Dutch Institute of Brilliant Failures has initiated a new award for the development aid sector. The idea of this annual award is: without failure, no progress.

Time and time again history has shown us that our most valuable experiences are more likely to come from mistakes than from successes. We learn from our failures and our failures are a source of inspiration for others. In this respect failure is not only an option but failure is also necessary. The new Transparency Award in the Development Aid Sector is created to stimulate openness and transparency in this sector.

Q: Why do you think recognizing failure is important, particularly in our field of ICT and aid/development?

Recognizing failure is very important because people and organizations can learn from each other. People are afraid to be associated with failure and this blocks the learning capacity. The key is to dare to learn and innovate by interacting. We think an open dialogue regarding the complexity of development aid, well thought attempts and common failures is a requirement.

Due to the fact that TTC received this audience award a big step is made towards more openness and transparency in the development aid sector. We are very proud to win this award and will definitely participate in the competition next year. We hope more organizations will have more brilliant failures and participate than this year. We hope organizations will realize that this is not a public humiliation but an opportunity to create more success stories.

Q: Tell us, what was Text to Change’s Brilliant Failure?

TTC is a non-profit organization that allows mobile phone users in Africa to participate in text message quizzes and win prizes through interactive education and development programs. This year, 6 out of 10 people in Africa own a mobile phone. Text to Change challenges participants by sending multiple choice questions not only on health subjects but also on economic development.

Our Brilliant Failure was our first project that spread out an HIV/AIDS text message quiz in Uganda.

Nobody ever tried this before. We thought everything was taken care of, nothing could go wrong. We were focused on content, technique and our financial means, except for…the SMS code that the Ugandan government would provide us. The morning of the project’s launch we were told the SMS code was 666 and this caused a lot of commotion. 666 is the devil’s number and the involved partners were all Christians, and wanted to stop the project. Fortunately, we were able to change the SMS code into 777.

Q: What is the big lesson learned/what should we all keep in mind when designing similar projects?

No matter how well prepared you are, keep in mind that unexpected things can happen. We were so focused on all external factors that we forgot to check our own SMS code in advance. Never assume that you are in total control.

This week, an interdisciplinary group of investors, social entrepreneurs, funders, innovators – including innovators in the ICT4D and mobiles for social impact space, have gathered at the sold-out conference, SOCAP 10 (Social Capital Markets).

Inspired by the first NYC and Washington, DC FailFaires, Catapult Design checked out our tips on “Rolling Your Own Failfaire” and decided that the SOCAP audience too would be ripe to openly and honestly discuss the challenges and failures within social enterprise. We hope participants will engage in a robust conversation and heed eachothers’ lessons and avoid reinventing the wheel and making the same mistakes as they embark on future projects and programs!

If you are at the event today, Tuesday Oct. 5th, check out the FailFaire session at 11am.

Here’s the original informational blogpost published over at Catapult Design’s blog:

Catapult hosts first SOCAP FAILFaire

Join Catapult Design on Day Two at SOCAP ’10 in San Francisco for the first west coast FAILFaire, a forum for open and honest discussion around failed initiatives within social enterprise.  Moderated by Catapult, all SOCAP attendees are invited to participate by presenting their failures that led to greater understanding or later successes.  Whether it be a failed initiative, a failed business relationship, or a failure in implementation, we will provide a safe venue for discussion, insight, and lessons learned.  The objective of the 90-minute session:  to learn from the mistakes of others, and perhaps contribute to someone else’s success in the process.

The first FAILFaire was organized by MobileActive, a non-profit connecting people, organizations, and resources using mobile technology for social change, in New York and followed by a DC FAILFaire hosted by the World Bank.  Originally focused on fail stories from ICT and mobile development, the SOCAP FAILFaire opens up the topic to social enterprise and technology.  As an organization focused on the development of transformational technologies for people living in disadvantaged communities, we’ve witnessed firsthand the profusion of abandoned and ignored technologies collecting dust in rural hospitals, schools, and homes.  We’ve also witnessed organizations falling prey to the same mistakes made by previous organizations.  Yet these stories are for the most part hidden, when they could directly benefit the community at large.

So if you’ve been part of a project that didn’t quite work out, join us on October 5th and tell your story!   We want to hear and learn from you.

For those who can’t attend, check back on our blog for the major takeaways from the event!

As we at MobileActive.org have been covering ICT and mobiles for development now for more than five years, we have seen our fair share of failures. For every great project that changes how a community benefits from technology to improve the lives of its people, there seem to be twice as many projects that fail, and end up wasting time, money, and maybe worst, goodwill.

Too often in our field, we talk up our successes, overhype and overestimate the value of our projects, and sweep the failures under the rug. But, if we don’t talk about what didn’t work (and, perhaps more importantly, why it didn’t work), others will keep repeating the same mistakes.

That is why we invented FailFaire, a gathering that is happening tonight in New York City and that we hope will take place in other cities around the world. FailFaire is a place where it’s ok to talk about what didn’t work to learn from for the next project using mobiles for social change and development.

Of course, there are different kinds of failure – some projects meet their basic objectives but are too expensive or unsustainable in the long run, some projects don’t fulfill their original mission but succeed in other (and sometimes surprising ways) ways, while some projects are just a flaming ball of fail. In the spirit of Hidin’s Top 10 Failure Points in Information System Implementation, we present here a sure way to fail in M4D: MobileActive.org’s Guide to Failure.

If you follow each of the headlines, you are sure to fail. If you read on below each invective, however, we point out ways to avoid utter failure. It’s not a recipe for success but may decrease the probability of failure and increasing the likelihood of helping people to have more free, healthy, prosperous, and dignified lives.

(more…)

As we are delving deeply into failure in IT and, of course, particularly ICT4D (For the unwashed, that is ‘information and communication technologies for development. Breathe), we are finding more and more smart thinkers on the topic. One is Rita McGrath who is a professor at Columbia. In a blog post today at the Harvard Business Review, she writes about intelligent failure and cautions us not to squander the valuable intelligence that failure offers.

Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in better-understood situations….

For many years, scholars such as my esteemed colleague Sim Sitkin of Duke (see his article “Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses,” ) have been studying how organizations learn, and they have come to the conclusion that intelligent failures are crucial to the process of organizational learning and sense-making. Failures show you where your assumptions are wrong. Failures demonstrate where future investment would be wasted. And failures can help you identify those among your team with the mettle to persevere and creatively change direction as opposed to pig-headedly charging blindly ahead. Further, failures are about the only way in which an organization can re-set its expectations for the future in any meaningful way.

While she addresses failure in this context from in intra-organizational perspective (useful but not sufficient) we would argue that failure must also be understood in the context of an emerging field. Mobile tech for social change and development would rather qualify as an “emerging field” where we make it up as we go along. Hence, if we keep failure bound in the confines of the organization, we, as a field and community of practice, will not learn – not intelligently or otherwise.

So, what makes intelligent failure that is a learning opportunity as opposed to wasted?  McGrath notes these characteristics of intelligent failure:

• They are carefully planned, so that when things go wrong you know why
• They are genuinely uncertain, so the outcome cannot be known ahead of time
• They are modest in scale, so that a catastrophe does not result
• They are managed quickly, so that not too much time elapses between outcome and interpretation
• Something about what is learned is familiar enough to inform other parts of the business [or field]
• Underlying assumptions are explicitly declared
• These can be tested at specific checkpoints, identified in advance, since planned results may not be equivalent to outcomes.

She asks exactly the right questions – those that we are after in conceiving FAILfaire:  “Are we genuinely reaping the benefit of the investments we’ve made in learning under uncertain conditions? Do we have mechanisms in place to benefit from our intelligent failures? And, if not, who might be taking advantage of the knowledge we are depriving ourselves of?”

I am an avid reader of ZD Net’s IT Project Failure blog. It’s a great selection of IT failures in the US – corporate IT failures. Michael Krigsman is an astute student of IT failures and has some great insights. One of these is this one:  Studying IT failures is important. We are in an industry where (as the much hyped Gartner figures goes) we see failure rates of up to 70%.  Failure happens at an astonishing rate. Only by understanding why IT projects fail do we have a sliver of a chance to reduce that failure rate.

Add to that the other dimension of the field that we are in: International Development.  Helping people and societies increase their own capacity to address their problems and increase the quality of life for their fellow citizens.  Or, as the Wikipedia puts it:  “International development.. seeks to implement long-term solutions to problems by helping developing countries create the necessary capacity needed to provide such sustainable solutions to their problems.”  Which, as we are now all beginning to acknowledge, is also hard. Very hard.  And, also littered with failure – something we talk even less about than corporate IT flops.

Technology, and particularly mobile technology, has, of course, as of late been lauded as the second coming in international development.  And while we certainly agree that there is much potential for the use of mobile tech to support the development, governance, accountability, and democracy efforts that we all work on, we also believe that, as a field, we are now mature and wise enough to start to take a close look at what is not working.  And have the guts and insights to talk about these flops and failures in a constructive and forthright manner.

Bring in FAILfaire.  It is a way for us to come together and talk about exactly this – what did not work, why, and how to do better.  We hope that the inaugural event in New York (where we are based) is only the beginning of a long series of conversations to talk about where we fall short and why.  Because a lot is riding on that we do.  I am reminded of a post I read by an aid worker who is nothing but wise, reflective, and honest about his field.  He writes:

It is not that we should be endlessly self-critical. The work that we do does accomplish some good. But I am challenged to remain in a state of confident humility. We must not just sit and watch while the problems of our fellow humans go unattended. We must do something, and we must do it confidently. And we must do all of this humbly. If my own experience is at all representative – and I believe that it is reasonably so – then we must go about the business of making the world a better place mindful of the fact that we are all still learning. We will make mistakes along the way. Maybe our mistakes will outnumber and outweigh our successes. We must keep in realistic perspective the limitations of what we have to offer, not just technically or intellectually, but as human beings.

Katrin, New York, March 18, 2010