FailFaire

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