A Site Chock Full of Failures!

by on March 22, 2011 in Uncategorized

I wrote yesterday about the need for nonprofit organizations to open, loudly, courageously admit their failures. And voila! Maggie Leithead (@maggieleithead on Twitter) suggested a great site called Admitting Failure, created by Engineers Without Borders in Canada, that aggregates great stories of nonprofit failures!

There are great stories and courageous folks on this site.

Here are just a couple of examples from the site:

Owen Scott of  Engineers Without Borders, Canada wrote:

I can think of two major failures from this story:

1. Prioritizing tangible activities as outcomes. Success is hard to find sometimes in development work and can have a serious effect on how we think about it. For me, success quickly became about having the district staff collect data –it was tangible, concrete, and simple. Success wasn’t about the district office valuing the program or about behavior change. This all but guaranteed that my own priorities and the actual priorities of the district would eventually become misaligned.

2. Using distorting financial incentives to achieve an outcome. This is a classic pitfall in development, and one that I walked right into. Once I had an outcome in mind – data collection – it became easy to organize the NGO funding needed to make it happen. But using financial means to achieve my outcome (almost bribery in a way) quickly eroded the foundation of actual relevance that would be necessary for long-term sustainability of our program.

And here is part of a post by Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust:

The second problem with our Marketplace projects is that we track the gross economic impact of foreign spending, instead of the net impact. As you all know, $1m of donor money spent buying Chinese desks from a Kabul vendor is not the same as $1m spent in Helmand buying vegetables from a local farmer. Frankly, the latter will probably have a bigger economic impact than the former. It will create more jobs, and possibly even greater tax revenue and GDP growth. But we don’t have a grip on how to accurately analyze the direct effects of increased local spending, and the gross dollar figure approach is too crude.

I agreed with Vantage Point who wrote on Twitter: This is fantastic! Wish it were broader.

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  • http://www.melindaklewis.com Melinda Lewis

    This is great! I can think of so many ways in which sharing our failures makes a difference, not the least of which would be a greater willingness to make them in the first place, which could lead to totally different approaches to nonprofit decision making. I’d like to see this kind of approach in policy-making, too; too often, policymakers think that everything has to be cast as a success, albeit sometimes partial ones, when the truth is that some policy innovations have been abysmal failures that have real lessons to teach us, and to teach other policymakers. Thanks for sharing this!

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