When we are young, we are often encouraged to learn from our mistakes. As parents, we are certainly continuing this traditional mantra on a regular basis. And I would venture to say that for most, the value of this counsel eventually does sink in. What is ironic is that learning from our mistakes actually gets harder and harder to do as one gets older….especially in a person’s professional life….and even more so if that person happens to work in the social sector.
Why? Because in the social sector there either is or is perceived to be a very short leash. If a program or service is found not to have the desired impact and if a leader is actually transparent about that, it often means funding streams dry up quickly. In some cases this is clearly merited as no one wants to waste money, especially when the money could lead to better results for something as important as children.
But the unfortunate byproduct is that it encourages everyone to put a positive spin on whatever they are doing. Even more directly, it prohibits people from learning transparently from their mistakes so others can learn with them. We call this practice, as have others before us, “failing forward.”
We would assert there has never been a more important time for all of us working in the social sector to embrace this practice of failing forward. In this economy, or the “New Normal” as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called it, we simply have to think about new ways of using limited resources. We have to be willing and able to apply learning in real-time to use limited resources more efficiently and effectively.
We have seen that the members of the Cradle to Career Network are willing to embody this ethic. They are only able to do this because key cross-sector leaders in their community are taking the long-term view. They see the importance of using data to improve. And they are willing to make some mistakes along the way as they figure out how to do so.
One very concrete example from our early work in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky was how we selected our community level outcomes. We initially had a very small and insular group of leaders pick the core student outcomes we wanted to focus on as a community. When these were “revealed” to all there was immediate backlash. We had to backtrack and go through a much more transparent process that helped build broad community ownership.
This could have tanked the effort. But instead, cross-sector leaders were willing to acknowledge the mistake and stick with the process. And as a result, a baseline report card on outcomes that community partners agreed were important was completed. The fifth annual report card was recently released and the importance of this document continues to grow. Perhaps even more importantly, by sharing this “failure” openly, we are now working with other communities to avoid similar mistakes and get to better results faster.
There are numerous examples of efforts to celebrate this culture of “failing forward”, such as Fail Faires and Failure Reports. We want to model this behavior in our Network by having our own Fail Forward Fest at the National Convening in Dallas on September 25th to 27th . We hope you will consider submitting your own story of how you have learned and applied lessons from mistakes. If we all give each other the space to do this, we may just make it a bit easier as we get older to practice what our parents preached.
This post was written by
Jeff Edmondson – who has written 16 posts on Striving for change.
Jeff Edmondson is the managing director of the Strive Network
