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Next USAID Innovation: Learning from Failure
June 22, 2011
I spent part of yesterday at a United Nations Foundation meeting with Dr Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID. There was a lot of discussion of development applications using mobile phones (m-development) and how to do them better –things like interoperability and collecting models in an ‘m-app marketplace.’ And there was the usual back-and-forth between those who wanted to see more transformative projects where IT reformed whole agencies and ministries and those who thought that way madness (or at least obscene overruns) lay.
But I thought the most interesting discussion was around learning from experience –particularly in an area where technology is evolving rapidly, so a robust evaluation may not be completed before the project itself looks as dated as an integrated rural development scheme or a structural adjustment loan. The randomized trial result suggesting limited evidence of educational spillovers from a distribution program of Nintendo 64’s might not carry too much weight for those wanting to hand out Wiis as part of a youth fitness program.
One way to speed learning is to encourage project managers and implementers themselves to highlight if things seem to be going particularly well or badly early on in the process. Think of it as the development equivalent of stopping the medical trial because the product so obviously doesn’t work –or works so well it would be immoral to deny the control group such a valuable treatment.
Things are rarely so clear cut successes in development as they can be in medical trials, but we really didn’t have to wait around too long to declare m-finance in Kenya a rip-roaring wonder, for example. On the side of failure, the problem is a little different –it might be complicated to get managers and implementers to come forward and admit so rapidly that their project is a waste of time and resources. And more than one person at the meeting suggested it is just too risky in general to say you’ve failed. Dark things were muttered about ‘the current climate’ (stormy with a 70 percent chance of budget cuts?).
The good news is that USAID doesn’t look like it is shying (further) away from risk. The new Development Innovation Ventures program is designed to mimic a venture capital model to identify, test and scale solutions to development challenges. The model stages funding –so projects that don’t work out at the identification or test stage won’t get more money to roll out. The meeting also discussed the possibility of a USAID FailFaire –or even Fail Summit—that would encourage people to come out in the open and say what didn’t work and why. If the authorizing environment could allow, another change to encourage early exit from bad projects would be to let project managers keep some or all of the remaining budget resources from a self-declared failed project to spend on something else in the same sector and country that might actually work.
But what about ‘the current climate’? First off, I’m not convinced that even the Agency’s most committed supporters would be surprised that some USAID projects are duds. And they don’t need a FailFaire to find examples (Google “USAID Project Failure” if you have any doubts). Second, if USAID projects never failed, that would suggest the Agency was being obscenely, counterproductively, risk-averse in a field where risk (political, administrative, economic, climate) is everywhere. Any portfolio of investments has some bad apples –as long as it has some stars as well, that’s OK. Does every enterprise supported by the Small Business Administration grant turn into a Starbucks or a Facebook? Of course not –and lots fail, miserably. But when it turns out that the market in Topeka for Che Guevara Beanie Baby knock-offs was more limited than the financial plan projected, and the business folds, the SBA moves on. USAID should do the same thing –and not be afraid of telling Congress that’s the approach.
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3 Responses to “Next USAID Innovation: Learning from Failure”
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June 22nd, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) has been publically publishing an annual “Failure Report” since 2008. When the initiative was started EWB had a discussion around the risk of losing donor support but ultimately decided that sharing the learning was more important than any resulting loss in funding.
Rather counter-intuitively, donors were almost universally supportive of EWB’s Failure Report for reasons touched upon in this blog. Namely that openly admitting failure indicates a willingness to take risks, be innovative, honest and continuously learn to improve programs.
To encourage this shift towards transparent learning cultures in development AdmittingFailure.com was launched earlier this year and now is home to a collection of ‘failures’ from many different organisations who support this trend. It all goes to show if you can demonstrate you are learning from your failures, admitting them can only lead to greater trust and credibility with donors.
All over the place the golden word: innovation, is being linked with the F-word: failure. Just read the Huffington Post interview with Aleem Walji of the World Bank Institute’s Innovation Team for proof of trend.
So the chink in the failure armour does not seem to lie in the developed world. It is relatively low-risk, and even kind of sexy, for people with job titles like Chief of Innovation to talk about learning from failure to improve effectiveness. It is much more difficult for partner organisations in developing countries – from project managers to field implementers – to talk about failures in the projects they are working on.
Experimentation leading to innovations (and the resulting expectation of some level of failure) seems to be a luxury Chiefs of Innovation can spend time working on. The question I’m trying to figure out is how do we use this learning-from-failure trend to make it safer for those closer to the implementation of the projects to openly discuss failures too?
June 24th, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Interesting take on perceived failure in USAID.
If only it were that positive.
USAID and their managemnt have a culture that abhors the word failure. They view that to admit even a weakness will seriously affect their future funding and their own personal career.
I have been involved with two major USAID country reconstruction programmes, Bosnia and Iraq.
I can tell you that denial is a high priority in USAID and to get reports approved can take up to 3 times the time span of the analysis and report writing.
People within USAID have been broken and set out to pasture for not agreeing to the general concensus, even though they were later proved correct.
Even when senior people reporting to Congress are positive in their attitude into revealing weaknesses and failures, they are hamstrung and even harrangued by the development programme managers and directors.
State Department is a little more forthcoming, though even they balk at too much critical self analysis.
USAID needs a serious culture change and it has to come from the top.
I have to admit that this culture situation is fairly general in all state international development agencies, with the EC being the worst.
July 1st, 2011 at 1:35 am
Establishing Development Innovation Ventures and hiring a Chief Innovation Officer are excellent efforts by USAID to introduce an acceptance of failure on the edges of the organization. As Colin suggests, the barriers to making failure acceptable in the organization as a whole are great. Not least of which is individual performance assessment. When someone is assigned for one, two, or three years to a country, and the next post depends partly on the success in the current post, no one wants to make her mark by having the mission’s best-evaluated failure during that period. Understandably. Although a FailFaire may seem a bit silly to some, if it allows individual USAID officers and country missions to get positive recognition, it could be a step in the direction of changing the relationship between project “success” and individual career advancement.