All posts in Failure

Failure

Between 2008 and 2009, the EWB Malawi Water and Sanitation team went through a lengthy and winding strategic narrowing process. This process brought our organization from working with high breadth across the sector and little focus, partnering with nearly any organization in the sector who would work with us, to a focused change strategy with defined goals and fewer stakeholders. In late 2009, our team faced a leadership transition – the leader and manager of the program was finishing with EWB leaving space for other potential leaders in the organization’s pipeline to step up. The process of transition was happening at a time of massive ambiguity – we were aiming to narrow our strategy into something containable from something unwieldy while trying to consider many different perspectives, which meant all of our team’s conversations were characterized by uncertainly and complexity.

What we did and what went wrong

At this point of change, our team faced two challenges at once: defining a complex change strategy, which was ambiguous, and managing a leadership transition, for which we had no defined process. Our team faced a cyclic problem – we needed to invest in leadership transition, but because our strategy definition process was so ambiguous, we never felt comfortable investing in that process. How do you set up someone to transition into a job managing a strategy that you haven’t defined yet? As a result, the transition process was forced to be as ambiguous as the strategy, meaning that leaders stepping into the process were unclear of what was expected of them.

Western development workers who step into leadership roles in a place like Malawi must “unlearn” many leadership instincts they have. For example, it is important for team leaders to resist the temptation to “sell” our work to all sector stakeholders all the time as this is not seen as appropriate until you’ve built the right relationship in the Malawian water sector. Insights such as there are very difficult to characterize in a job description or in an orientation meeting. Rather, they have to be experientially learned and often “coached out” by others with more experience. The ability to lead in such an environment is as much about who you are being as it is about what you are doing, and the type of feedback one needs to receive to grow in such areas requires a long arc of mentoring of new leaders before they being playing the role.

We did not invest as a system of people in leadership succession early enough. The absence of an explicit and early leadership transition process meant that we did not adequately invest in the up-front skills, relationships, and team dynamics building that needed to take place before transitioning new leaders into the role. By waiting too long to recognize the gravity what was needed with an organization focused on highly complex change, we created more work for ourselves and failed to take full advantage of the opportunities our team already had.

What this failure cost us

This failure did not cause damage as such, but led to a number of missed opportunities and a greater momentum loss than was necessary for our team. To this day, there are relationships in the sector that have laid fallow for the past year that our team has yet to revive due to the momentum that was lost at the end of 2009. For example, one of our team’s very difficult to achieve change goals is to enter a highly collaborative relationship with one of the National Ministries involving the secondment of one of our staff at that level.

In addition, internal challenges were caused that led to increase management complexity and slower decision making. The rocky leadership transition process was distracting for our team, which diverted much needed energy away from our very complex process of defining success for our strategy. Ironically, this undermined our team’s goal of increasing strategic clarity, which was the main outcome we wanted from our strategic definition process. The mandate and strategy for our CLTS program suffered as a result of that distraction, and as such we have failed to advance our positioning in that part of the sector much further than it was at the end of 2009.

Failure

This is a story about detecting and learning from failure. In development, sometimes it’s hard to know if something is a failure or not.Many development initiatives do not have concrete outcomes that can be easily deemed failure or success.If you drill a well, and you did not find water, it was a failure, but you will not drill there again.If your idea is to keep youth in school and HIV-free through sport, it’s not as easy to recognize mistakes and to avoid making them over and over again.

GlobalGiving, over the course of several months in 2009, used direct community feedback to detect a failing organization. The organization, SACRENA, based in Kisumu, Kenya, worked with disadvantaged youth, specifically keeping youth out of trouble by operating a soccer league. The organization received $8,019 USD from 193 donors through the GlobalGiving platform and received support from other funders as well.

In early 2009, GlobalGiving visited Kisumu and handed out bumper stickers with the following question:“What does your community need?Tell us:globalgiving.org/ideas.”We did a series of community surveys, workshops, staff visits, and volunteer visits, all in an effort to listen actively to what the community was saying about organizations participating in GlobalGiving’s online marketplace.A variety of community members identified SACRENA as having problems.We followed up with more targeted volunteer visits and a formal audit.The picture was clear.This organization, while nominally running a soccer program, was not managing its affairs well and was alienating its own beneficiaries, who saw the organization’s leadership as ineffective and corrupt. One submission to GlobalGiving’s online feedback form read:

“formerly as i was one of the footballers and also official members we were being treated with a lot of respect and also we managed to travel to the neighbouring countries for other tournaments after this things over suddenly changed when the co-ordinator was given kshs. 1,000,000 to promote the club but with his greediness he managed to biologically swallow all the amount to himself and also sold all the balls that were given out”

With evidence of failure mounting, we asked the individuals who had expressed dissatisfaction with SACRENA whether GlobalGiving should remove SACRENA from GlobalGiving’s web site, cutting off a major source of income.Initially, these individuals did not recommend removal, because they valued the idea of the program, even if the leadership was ineffective.Instead, they asked GlobalGiving for more oversight over the organization.GlobalGiving connected SACRENA with two volunteers from the University of Oregon’s graduate program in conflict resolution, who initially worked to resolve the tension between SACRENA’s leadership and its beneficiaries, but who ultimately helped two community members launch a new organization to take the place of SACRENA.

With the new organization in place, the community overwhelmingly recommended removing SACRENA from GlobalGiving. So, by making this feedback process visible and open to all, we were able to identify a failing organization, to visibly remove it from our marketplace, and to send a signal to the community that inspired a new program to emerge.It remains to be seen whether this new organization will learn from the previous organization’s failure, but the possibility exists that this failure will help the new organization avoid making the same mistakes.

Failure

My own failure involves trying to teach rural kids and Indian kids in Northern Canada. Step 0 (which I did not really understand at the time and the school boards had their heads in the sand about) is what we are educating the kids for — there are no factory jobs and very few office jobs, so most school skills are irrelevant to most of the people, and few of them even envision college — and thinking of envisioning college, not understanding and working with the expectations of the local people who need to know what is available out there. The net result of all this schooling and money spent seems to be a further dichotomy between the rural poor and the native people versus the urban middle class.

Failure

Recently, four allied grassroots campaigns (1Sky, Clean Energy Works, the Energy Action Coalition and Focus the Nation) set out to build an unprecedented online community: multiple organizations engaging their supporters together toward common goals on a shared online platform. We called it “The Climate Network.”

Despite a significant financial investment and hours of planning, coding, reviewing, designing, outreach, and training to make the project a success, we were ultimately unable to achieve what we hoped. The ambition of the online organizing platform never matched the success of the offline organizing community and strategy. After 12 months, it folded.

What happened? A number of things didn’t go as planned, despite the best efforts of these four organizations, their staff, and several of our best and most active online community members. However, almost everyone involved with the project said if they could do it again, they would, with the right planning and preparation.

If your nonprofit, campaign, movement, or cause is considering developing an online grassroots organizing model or a custom online community tool to support your advocacy or organizing efforts, then we hope our story will help you avoid some pitfalls, and achieve ambitious online organizing goals.

Failure

In 1972, shortly after the liberation war, I was sent by CARE to Bangladesh, “a thumbprint of a country in a vast continent” as Tahmima Anam has so eloquently described it. I was to work on a self-help housing cooperative project. We provided plans, material and technical assistance to help people build their own low-cost, cyclone-resistant houses. We imported thousands of tons of cement and enough corrugated tin sheets to cover a dozen football fields. The project was massive, but it failed. The houses were constructed, but the cooperatives – which were arguably the most important component because they aimed to generate funds for longer-term agricultural development and employment – failed miserably. We had a large office in Dhaka – then known as Dacca – lots of jeeps and trucks and speedboats, and many international staff with energy and commitment to spare. Our only problem was that we had almost no idea what we were doing.

While I was in Dhaka ordering freighters full of cement from Thailand, a tiny organization was forming on the other side of town, and in the rural areas of faraway Sylhet to the north. I recall meeting Fazle Hasan Abed at least once in 1972 or 1973, and I remember people speaking about BRAC with a kind of awe. Their attitude did not flow from anything remarkable BRAC was doing at the time – everything was remarkable in those terrible postwar years. What caught people’s attention was the fact that BRAC was a Bangladeshi development organization – something that few outsiders had ever heard of, much less conceived.

Over the years I have been privileged to return to Bangladesh many times, often to work with BRAC on a project design or an evaluation or a report. I have never visited and found the same organization twice. On each visit there is always something new – ten thousand more schools; a dairy; a university; a functional cure for tuberculosis. In 2007 BRAC’s microfinance lending topped a billion dollars. A billion. The amazing thing about all of BRAC’s achievements is that they have been accomplished in one of the most hostile climates in the world – hostile in every sense of the word: meteorologically speaking, economically and politically. And now BRAC is taking its lessons to other Asian countries and Africa.

Failure

Okay – I’m willing to put something out here because this is an interesting blog. I believe in learning from mistakes but I’d also warn that not everyone can disclose the mistakes they’ve made!

In the mid-1990s I studied the gender dynamics of rural women’s groups in western Kenya. NGOs, donors and generally outsiders were certainly preoccupied with women’s groups.

Failure

I was starting up a disaster risk reduction program in the rift valley in Ethiopia in 1988. The Derg military “Albanian Marxist” style government was still in place. The local government controlled women’s association asked us to help with buying a small grain mill for them, to cut down hand grinding, or paying extortionate prices to the local mill owner to grind their grain. At the time, when I ran the numbers, I thought this was a marginally useful investment. It would have a hard time making a profit and would not really save the women that much cash or labor.
Btu, when the military regime fell and looting was wide spread across the area, the women took it in turns to mount a 24 hour guard on their mill, forming a cordon around it and safeguarding it.

Failure

The Zambian cotton industry was going great by most accounts at the start of the PROFIT project.  PROFIT was a USAID funded project that was designed to foster increased competitiveness in the agricultural sector leading to increased poverty reduction.  During the early stages of the project it was assessed and agreed to that the cotton industry provided an excellent opportunity to build upon the success at the time of multiple years of growth according to many economic and donor analyses.

As the project conducted its own analysis to confirm early desk studies it saw a very different picture.  It saw stagnant yields, increasing competition between processers based on win-lose outcomes, and increasing distrust between all players in the value chain.  It also saw very few benefits accruing to farmers or firms in the system, including an unhealthy concentration of risk at the processer level.  The growth had been narrowly defined by overall production and number of farmers getting input via a processer.  The project also identified that farmers did not feel the land or cotton was theirs – they got free inputs, they worked a bit on the land resulting in limited yields, then gave the cotton back to the company for a very small amount of money – they were simply selling their labour because they had no other options.

Faced with this conclusion that ran counter to the overwhelming perspective in the industry that things were great, the project decided to meet with various processors to offer assistance in restructuring the way they did business to specifically improve performance on farmer yields and overall profitability.  As you would guess, the project’s attempts to engage the industry failed except for some support to train farmers – mostly on things they had been trained on before and did not adopt.

The conditions that had allowed the Zambian cotton industry to continue growth despite high inefficiency eroded from 2006 onwards.  Specifically, cotton prices were trending downwards, options for farmers to sell their labour was increasing, the local currency was appreciating rapidly, and levels of risk at the processer level left very little room for error.  Within a short period of time cotton processers, who had stopped engaging with the project came back to ask if the project could re-engage.

Failure

We started a project in 2008 where NEDA (Nurture : Educate : Develop : Affirm)  would accept Enterprise Development funds from private companies on behalf of qualified, disenfranchised beneficiaries.  IFC (Innovative Franchise Concepts) then used the money to help beneficiaries buy, start and maintain their own Franchise Business.

Our first project was Fast Forward Cafe, which was aimed at upgrading Street Traders in Johannesburg, South Africa.
We were awarded a tender and signed an MOU with Metro Trading Co. in Johannesburg to start the project. Unfortunately the government organisation changed their minds and denied us the permissions they had already granted us, to place the Fast Forward Cafe mobile units on street corners and at Public Transport stations.

We also had issues with beneficiaries who had a spirit of expectation.  Some beneficiaries took their huge profits and went on holiday leaving their staff unpaid, others hired illegal immigrants and paid them disgusting rates per week.

Mainly due to the inability to place our units on Viable Commuter Routes, we had to shut down the project in 2010.  It was heartbreaking to watch this happen after 3 years, 3 people’s time and 3 million rand had been invested in the project.

Failure

I started my microcredit operation in Indonesia in February 2008. Around mid-2009 the business grew to larger than 400 members and the repayment rate was above 90%. We gave $100-200 loans to small business owners.

The plan to grow larger too soon backfired. My staff in Indonesia and I did not select small business clients carefully. I was in Indonesia in 2010 and found that our clients borrowed money without careful business planning. Their businesses were having difficulties soon after getting the microloans. Some used the money for consumption.

The 90% repayment rate dropped to 50% in 2010. We are still struggling now to bring the repayment to a sustainable level.

I decided to increase the interest rate to make the microloans not cheap. We found that the clients took us for granted. They used the microloans to pay loan sharks. Our “cheap” money was not treated as a valuable resource. A totally unexpected outcome from what I thought initially.