The Authentic Organization

[slug]why fail[/slug]

In the context of knowledge management and learning, I’ve been actively exploring the topic of failure for many years. There are good reasons for this focus. Our relationship to failure is a powerful force, tied in with approval, shame, love, and even our sense of survival. In our lives and in our organizations, we reflect this dysfunctional relationship, and thus reinforce and reproduce it. Because this is very much a systems phenomenon, it’s hard to point to a single source from which the dynamic flows.

The mainstream culture in which I grew up (and which many of you share) has, at best, a difficult relationship with failure. Just start with the bizarre, one-dimensional definition of success: It’s all about wealth. That would leave anyone committed to civil society and nonprofits insecure from the very start.

I’ve oscillated between two destructive poles in my own relationship to failure: On the one hand, I am capable of sticking my head in the sand and denying failure, to my inner and outer detriment. On the other hand, I’ve often chosen to be quite candid about failure, but frequently this is in the context of an unforgiving environment. On those rare occasions when I’m wise enough, I realize that the two poles are a false dichotomy and then I choose the middle way.

“Fail Faster” was a motto of an organization I founded many years ago. It served as a reminder to me and my colleagues to shorten the cycle of experimentation, to recognize failure earlier, and to defuse its emotional baggage. Sometimes it worked.

It’s not just our culture or individuals that have a dysfunctional relation to failure. The more I learned to examine my own patterns, the more I saw corresponding patterns both in the organizations of which I was a part and in those which I had the opportunity to serve. This only makes sense, since organizations play a large role in mediating the relationships between individuals and society at large.

Everyone has stories about organizations and failure. One of my favorite is from a grantmaker whom I cannot name. (Of course, my choice to leave this anonymous, however appropriate, is very much a part of the cycle of reflection and reinforcement of the dysfunction.) They contracted for a multi-million dollar evaluation of a program area that had given hundreds of millions of dollars toward a particular strategy for serving at-risk youth and communities. As the story was told to me, the results of the evaluation were rather damning. But as those results made their way up the chain of command, the spin was slowly but relentlessly changed, all the way up to the board of trustees, who heard a classic mix of good news, with room for improvement.

Nonprofit programs that defy the gaze of realistic assessment survive because they serve unnamed social purposes quite distinct from their programmatic goals. Ego, power, and relationships of many kinds are at stake. And that, of course, is where things get both dangerous and interesting.