Lucy Bernholz flags an important and awkward issue in her Philanthropy 2173 blog: the essential link between innovation and failure. If we’re truly committed to fostering innovation and risk-taking in our organizations’ artistic and management efforts, failure should be a key indicator of our attempts to do so.
If you’ve ever taught someone to ice skate or downhill ski, this indicator is obvious. If you don’t fall frequently, you’re not trying hard enough. You’re stiff and conservative in your motion, unwilling to commit, and therefore more slow to learn.
And yet, where is the expectation and even celebration of failure in the metrics of major foundations, major donors, and board meetings? And where is our strategy, modeled in some industries, to ”fail earlier, fail faster and reallocate the resources from the failures”?
So, at your next staff meeting, raise a coffee mug to a recent project that went horribly wrong. Someone should be congratulated.
As Michael Moran’s book tells us, “Do it wrong quickly.” I believe…I believe!
John Maxwell has a book also, “Failing Forward” that argues for the major difference between high achievers and “average” achievers is how they treat failure. It is interesting that grantors and foundations seem to have a culture all their own about failure — while failure is recognized positively in the for-profit world, start-up world, and in the collaborative arts world. There must be room for failure if there is to be innovation. Might be fun to contrast that with mutations in evolution that lead to “sticky” new characteristics of species, due to the success of the mutation, which was originally failure, genetically speaking.
The Nonprofit Finance Fund has some very interesting white papers on the allocation of resources and ability to innovate. The nonprofit sector is not usually given the kind of cash-to-lose that risky ventures require, nor the usual kind of upfront funds for R&D and staff training that many for-profits include in their budgets. That being said, there are nonprofits and there are nonprofits – much of the day-to-day heavy lifting in our own communities is done by local groups in a fairly unsophisticated way – but there are probably many large nonprofits that can access the capital and cash necessary to innovate. One of the biggest challenges we face when framing this kind of discussion is which kind of nonprofit we’re addressing. Mostly, the conversation is fast and loose with easy division being between non- and for-profit, rather than conversations about scale, and the not-so-easily compartmentalized discussions of staff compensation and recruitment.