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Learning from Our Failures

Themes from the Conference of the Council on Foundations

by Michael C. Gilbert, May 2001

The theme for the 2001 annual conference of the Council on Foundations was accountability. Unlike most conference themes, the Council actually managed to have the concept reflected in many of the program elements. The program of the conference is still available and will give you some idea of how seriously they took the theme.

There was one particular aspect of the theme that came up in every panel I attended: Foundations and nonprofits need to do a much better job of learning from their failures.

Here are a few highlights from three panels.

Tapping the Intellectual Capital of Foundations

This panel was of deep interest to me given my work on nonprofit knowledge management. It was refreshingly focused not on technology, but on management. We are too often looking for the technological fix to our learning challenges, but there is no silver bullet.

One audience member asked a question that focused the panelists on the matter of failure, with several issues emerging: It's easier for grantmakers to talk about failure than for grant recipients, because their jobs are not on the line. But it's hard for most grantmakers themselves to focus on any kind of evaluation, let alone the depressing assessment of failures, because of the continual pressure to make the next round of grants.

Toward Ordinary Excellence

Starting with some recent research from the Brookings Institute on what it means to be an effective nonprofit, several panelists observed that we need to learn from more than just our successes. Indeed, sometimes the greatest learning is from our failures, but that there is no incentive for people to share them or even reveal them.

E-commerce and Nonprofit Sustainability

In the area of ecommerce, nonprofits have the opportunity to learn from the failures of many dotcom business enterprises. Publicly held companies are compelled by law to disclose a great deal of information that makes their projects subject to independent evaluation. Furthermore, because of the amount of money to be made, there are excellent independent research firms that will documents these failures whether the companies in question want them to or not.

I left the conference with two questions on my mind:

What can grantmakers do to their own internal incentive structures to encourage evaluation in general? I'm sure that Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and Grantmakers Evaluation Network are both looking at this issue.

What can nonprofits do to lower the risks of learning from our failures? When I was teaching career workshops for people doing nonprofit work, I taught that it was healthier to think of ourselves as working for a community of organizations, rather than a single nonprofit. But its very hard to overcome the anxieties of money, ego, and employment.

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