Nonprofits Need To Fail from the Inside Out
Beth Kanter
Trainer, Consultant & Nonprofit Innovator in digital transformation & workplace wellbeing, recognized by Fast Company & NTEN Lifetime Achievement Award.
I have been working in the nonprofit sector for 34 years, spending the last twenty of them focusing on the nonprofit technology sector to deliver training and capacity building. I have been waiting a long time to have a sector-wide conversation about learning from failure and last week at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, we were able to just that!
The plenary session was called “Placing Little Bets: Failing Informatively for the Nonprofit Technology Sector,”and I was joined by smart folks – Brian Reich, Erin Shy, Megan Kashner, and Allie Burns who represent different points of view in our community – from funders, disrupters, software platform, and nonprofits.
We discussed what the reaction to failure does to us as individuals and how it can create a risk-adverse culture in our nonprofits. We had the 1500 people in the room do thefailure bow – captured by here on video. As Brian Reich said, we have to get rid of our fear. We discussed what needs to happen inside of organizations and in the funder community to help nonprofits embrace failure and learning.
Here's the takeaways:
- Nonprofits and the people who work for them have to loose their fear of taking risks and that opens us up to fail and improve
- Failure is a luxury – and we can’t fail the people so it has to be incremental by learning to learn from placing a lot of Little Bets
- Nonprofits and funders need to change upfront expectations about projects and make space to allow for a fail or something not working out. It’s okay as long as we learn something from to improve.
- New definition of success: Adaptability and Transformation
- Nonprofits need to fail from the inside out — we have to make it okay to not be perfect inside of nonprofits and to honestly share lessons learned beyond our walls
- Many of the 1500 people in the room at NTC agree with us, but the challenge is when they go back to the office – culture change is needed
- Nonprofits need to embrace failure, not just accept it. This means front loading failure as well as doing “after action reviews.”
We came up with a call to action - a contest of sorts - for nonprofits to share their stories around placing a "Little Bet" and what they learned. Have a failure story to share? Learn more here.
Founder / President/ CEO To Love Children
11 年I am linking this page to a course I teach for UCLA Extension EmpowerED on Nonprofit Management and the subject of failing to learn came up as related to a process in Silicon Valley. Thank you Beth, Dr David Kenneth Waldman [email protected]
Executive Director @ Concerts in Care Ontario
11 年I was in a group discussion around creativity last night, and permission to fail as part of the process was a hot topic. I was glad to see someone pointed out the Engineers Without Borders' Failure Report - an excellent model for us all. How can you grow if you don't have little failure along the way. And let's face it, in the big picture, most are small. The big ones are fatal to the project, or the company. Small failures = positive growth!
Chief Executive at Northern Chamber Orchestra
11 年This is academically feeble but bear with me.... I remember listening to a Radio 4 lecture (go BBC!) entitled something like 'Fail early and learn'. Premise being that our primary learning experiences stem from our mistakes and that if we're prepare to risk making those mistakes at the outset, admitting and learning from them, then we can prevent bigger boo-boos later. George Osborne (UK Chancellor) are you paying attention?
on long-term sabbatical while searching for my next inspiration
11 年Engineers Without Borders Canada is one of the earliest NGO pioneers in recognizing the value of failure. It produces an annual failure report: https://legacy.ewb.ca/en/whoweare/accountable/failure.html
Behavioral Health | Autism Spectrum | Mental Health | Relationship Builder | Certified NLP
11 年Boards also can get too complacent about change until things really get bad. Association staff should be aggressive and thorough when presenting ideas for change. Just because things have been going along "okay" for some time does not mean that new initiatives should not be pursued - even if they mean a shit in priorities.