Fail Faire DC – Overall, a Win

I spent most of my evening listening to a group of honest folks describing their forays into the often treacherous world of information and communication technology (ICT) for development. Specifically, they spent their time being honest about a topic that so many in the development space have a tough time even raising: failure.

Fail Faire DC, put together by MobileActive.org and the World Bank, and hosted by the ever-buoyant Katrin Verclas, was created with the express purpose of learning from the numerous cases where ICT solutions had failed — tales of hubris, of unintended consequences, and of good intentions gone awry were all laid bare in an ostensibly safe space, where practitioners and policy-makers in a new field could learn from each others’ mistakes without finger-pointing and ridicule.

Presentations ranged from World Bank education projects to the National Democratic Institute’s election monitoring efforts in Gaza and Montenegro. Tim Kelly‘s presentation about infoDev’s Global Capacity Building Initiative for Regulators and its failure to even launch because of complicated structure and the divergent interests of its many funders was an instructive story for those who like to throw the word ‘global’ into their projects just because they can. Global scaling of projects isn’t easy. Local is hard enough. (PS: You’ll note that the last update to the page I linked to was made in 2007).

Michael Trucano from the World Bank breezed through a solid 50-slide presentation on the 9 things that cause tech-based educational programs to fail. Most were obvious, like failing to create educational content to match local needs, or only doing it long after the hardware had been deployed. But the fact that this list was based on real (though politely anonymous) programs brought home Trucano’s point that they are often missed in the enthusiasm to apply technology solutions to development problems. (For another great list, here’s MobileActive’s Definitive Guide to Failure)

There were even more telling tales of failure from Robert Kirkpatrick, now at UN Global Pulse and formerly employed at a “large software firm in the Pacific Northwest…” The meat of his speech was off-the-record and beyond the scope of this post. But that brings me to the real success of this event: that it even happened. Kirkaptrick made his presentation off-record for a good reason. The blowback for this kind of honesty in the face of failure can be drastic.

The naysayers about poor incentive structures in development aid have been around for a while. Bill Easterly and Tom Carothers, among others, have been beating that drum for years — there’s really no way for development organizations to honestly acknowledge their failures or learn from past experiences. But little has changed even in a sector so ripe with innovation and possibilities. Much of the discussion that followed the presentations centered on this issue. How do we create incentives for developers and deployers of ICTs for development to come to a place like Fail Faire and not have to be off-the-record? How do we make sure that institutions can learn from their own mistakes and those of others? Here are some of the points that came up, and good points all:

• It’s easier to get people who have succeeded a little to talk about their failures
• Have internal “fail faires” before coming out of the closet.
• Look at the way the private sector, especially parts like quality control on manufacturing, deal with their failures. There’s a lot to learn from their business process.
• Make a ‘failure clause’ a key part of the grant. Failure should not be incentivized, but if it happens, make sure that grantees are still rewarded for honest introspection.
• Create a ‘sandbox’ where programs are allowed to fail and insulated from severe retribution. Such sectors already exist in government — think of failed rocket ships. Was NASA dismantled over them?
• Create job security for those who you want to talk to about their failures.