Failure!
An interesting conversation is happening over at the Skoll Social Edge portal regarding the lack of acknowledgment of or lack of value placed on failure.
* Does private sector risk taking provide important lessons for the public sector spend?
* Is being safe with the money holding back real progress in social enterprise?
* Can Fifteen’s Annual report be a starter for frank talk and learning?
I am going to start blogging about our failures here in an effort to open a dialogue on the subject. I think many folks think that successful organisations get things right nearly all the time. In fact, it’s the getting things wrong more than you expect that produces the brilliant results in the end. This is especially true for social entrepreneurs; they are incubating/innovating/pioneering new ways of handling old problems. Perhaps a built in mechanism to gleam learning from failure(s) would attract social investment?
The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination “…why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me…” JK Rowling http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination