Fail, learn and adapt

Water services that last or failed investments? (source waterservicesthatlast)

It’s much more fun to talk about successes than disappointments. But, from personal experience, I know that the things that don’t work out as planned are often the most powerful catalysts of new insights and new behaviour. Failure from which we learn, holds the essence of future breakthroughs: “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” (~James Joyce)

So, with all the talk about learning for change on this blog, let’s take a minute to look at the positive role that experimentation and failure can play in fuelling a process of continuous improvement.

In development work- just like in business ventures, personal endeavors and public sector initiatives, things often go wrong. Reality doesn’t always follow the course stipulated in the project proposal or business plan. Admission of ‘failure’ can actually fuel a process of learning.  However, in the development sector, admitting failure is seen to jeopardise or undermine the whole endeavor. CASE Foundation director, Jean Case says: “It sometimes feels like philanthropic efforts are held to a different standard than in the private or public sectors. All too often there is less tolerance for mistakes, which leads many organizations to become risk-adverse. And when mistakes are made, the tendency is to sweep them under the carpet – thus depriving the sector of important lessons learned. But in reality, the very nature of innovation requires that we try new things and take risks. Sometimes they will work, other times they won’t – but in all cases, we should learn from our experiences and strive to do even better in the future.”

Fostering the courage to experiment and learn from failure

What do we mean when we talk of ‘failure’? Apparently, after Thomas Edison created the light bulb he said that he did not fail thousands of times. He simply was successful at figuring out thousands of ways not to do it—which led to his prolific innovation. If we want to innovate and improve, we need to be willing to take risks and experiment. And by  providing a safe environment for people to reflect on what does not work, we collectively accelerate the process of  finding what does.

In the WASH sector, when things don’t work, it directly impacts on people and the environment. When water doesn’t flow, or it isn’t clean, when toilets break down or there is no system to safely get rid of the waste, then people get sick and may even die. So, it is important that we commit to doing better, to learning from failure  to supporting innovation and to continuous improvement.

Jean Case wrote about challenges related to the Playpump, a waterpump that operates in a similar way to a windmill-driven water pump: while children play, they push the merry-go-round, pumping clean water into a storage tank. The idea is great: clean water, and a fun play experience. However there are many challenges around management, maintenance and sustainability of the play pumps.

Ensuring that water flows and toilets continue to work are complex challenges.  Communicating about what does not work and what we have learned is helpful for an individual, organization/project and the sector as a whole. Acknowledging failure stimulates self-reflection, feedback and knowledge sharing. Communicating failure makes the lessons more accessible to others, while also making it more acceptable for others to admit and learn from mistakes.

Inspiring examples

Errors are portals of portals of discovery (source:http://justmotivated.com)

Lessons ignored have a high cost. However, when much of the focus in a sector is on implementation, learning and adaptive management are often overlooked as key elements of a well-performing sector. Commitment to continuous improvement is essential for better service delivery and better use of sector resources. It’s encouraging to see development professionals in the WASH sector and others strive for transparency about failure and put efforts into learning for improvement. Here are just a few examples to reflect on.

Engineers Without Borders (EWB) have a great website  and blog where organizations can share their stories about dealing with failure and fail fairs where people come together and learn . They also publish an annual Failure Report where they list some of their notable failures over the past year and organize ‘safe spaces’ for experimentation and learning.

The Sanitation Community of Practice  (SanCoP for short) brings together academics NGO practitioners and other sector professionals to learn together about selected topics. In November 2012, they discussed the potentials and pitfalls of learning from failure in sanitation (read the blogposts by Aliki Zeri and by Stephen Jones about the key issues of debate, conclusions and dilemmas). This community of practice and makes a consistent effort to share and build on experience (both success and failures).

The Triple-S project suggests how experimenting can help rural water services and aims aiming for sector-wide and systemic change.  The approach brings together broad sector platforms for learning, emerging experiments that are tested in the ‘messy real world environment’ and can be applied at scale .

In the private sector, global consulting firm Arup sets an example by rewarding and supporting innovation and cross-sectoral collaboration: experimentation and learning are facilitated through ‘failsafe learning environments’ with collaborators from the academic, design and creative worlds. They work together in cooperative research centres, industry partnerships and open innovation platforms.

I also liked a blogpost by Sarah Rapp presenting The Recipe for Successful Adaptation and other lessons from Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt: why success always starts with failure‘ and the interesting discussion triggered by a blog post  by Ian Thorpe a while back.

What would you like to add to this list?

Read more about Sanitation Community of Practice (SanCoP)

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