Sunday 13 February 2011

Failure?

A Canadian NGO was in the news a week or two ago for publishing their failures. The fact that this made the guardian website is slightly sad – is our culture now so failure-shy that it’s newsworthy when someone is brave enough to acknowledge the mistakes they’ve made? Everyone makes mistakes – and it’s in our mistakes that we find the greatest learning. It’s tacitly acknowledged throughout the aid world, but there aren’t many people speaking about it. In donor reports, you try to phrase things in a way that doesn’t sound so negative as ‘we screwed up’. The donor wouldn’t be willing to accept that (or at least, that’s what we believe); and donors have the power of future funding and the life of the organisation. We want to keep the reputation of our organisation good, clean and professional. But who says that it should be unprofessional to be honest about our mistakes?

We do do that to a certain extent. Many donors have a ‘lessons learned’ section and we do internal learning reviews as well. However, these seldom get shared between programmes and the knowledge tends to get stored within the individuals. There are some opportunities to chat things over when you meet up with people from other projects but when there’s the huge pressure of time and too many things to do, the learning can sometimes fall down a hole. In aid work (probably in most things, but particularly in this setting) you’re never going to have a perfect project. You’re never going to be able to meet all of those targets, indicators and objectives you wrote in your project proposal (unless you were spectacularly un-ambitious in writing it). The staff have a low education and capacity level and are going to let you down. A broken bridge in the heavy rains is going to stop you being able to deliver the material in the time that it was expected. This particular approach, which had a lot of success in another country, is not necessarily going to work in the same way. This soil is lacking the right amount of phosphorous for groundnuts to grow well. These committees are going to sequester some of the materials. This seed is going to be spoiled during conservation. These things are part of the parcel of doing this type of work

Do we get punished for not being perfect? Sometimes, yes. There are some donors who will refuse to pay the costs of this or that expense because the process was not correctly followed. Whilst I can understand the need to have the rules (which help to promote a high standard), it does put a lot of pressure on the NGO and prevents flexibility on the ground which would result in a better project. As the donors hold the purse strings, they automatically have a lot of power and their requirements are being forced to come before the requirements of the beneficiaries. I can think of a few things that would have been better to do differently if we had been allowed to by the donors. This suggests to me that there is an over-regulation of projects – something that donors and NGOs are grappling with in the effort to have the best possible impact of the projects. Aid work continues to evolve, with new understanding and approaches being tried out. At one point, there was far too much leniency for NGOs and this allowed for money to be squandered. We will continue to search for a good balance.

There is a commonly held worry that by sharing mistakes (or weaknesses) than the other person will think less highly of us – we worry about losing their good opinion. Yet I know from line managing people that I would always prefer to hear someone say ‘I screwed up’ – and thereby take responsibility for their actions – rather than try to give this or that excuse for their actions. I have a lot more faith that they won’t make the same mistake again if they’ve recognised and acknowledged it. If we continue to justify our actions or lay the blame on someone else’s door (‘I was waiting for him to give me the documents’, or ‘everyone does it, so it can’t be that bad’ then we are not going to accept the fact that we have to change.

I heard someone give this quote this morning – ‘we want our ceiling to be your floor’. We want you to take where we are as a starting point, so you can quickly surpass us and go and do greater things, and do them better. If we don’t learn from the mistakes of history, we are doomed to repeat them. How can we do that if we don’t even share them?

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