Category Archives: Events

Fail Festival is an endless movement to talk honestly about failure in philanthropy and development.

Fail Festivals are crash and burn parties around the world to celebrate failure as a mark of leadership, innovation, and risk-taking in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs.

Here are a few of our more famous public events.

You can organize your own Fail Festival, or get professional help to curate a great Fail Festival at your next event.

Events

7 Steps for Intelligent Failure to Reduce Risk and Increase Success

learning with intelligent failure

Failure is a mark of leadership, innovation, and risk-taking in pushing the boundaries of what is possible and profitable in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs. We should be demanding a minimum level of failure as a proxy for how innovative an organization is.

Why ask for failure to ensure success?

In the research paper, Innovation, exnovation and intelligent failure, the authors argue that success can foster decreased investigations, increased complacency, risk aversion, and destructive homogeneity. Conversely, modest levels of failure can promote a willingness to take risks and foster resilience-enhancing experimentation.

Success and failure are therefore siblings.  An inability to learn from experience – and particularly failure – can doom a company to repeat the same mistakes over and over without improvement.

7 Steps for Intelligent Failure

They also define seven steps companies can use to reduce the risk of innovation failure and increase the probability of pilot success. Key ideas we can all learn from to keep from staring in the next Fail Festival.

1. Well-planned, thoughtful innovation

The first step for any good innovation is to invest in careful planning of what will be done and the expected outcomes.

For example, a Before Action Report can help document all the potential outcomes.  This the opposite of post hoc rationalizations of why something was started, after its already in process and potentially failing.

2. Documented uncertain outcomes

An experiment, pilot, or test, are all by definition leading to multiple uncertain outcomes.  However, they don’t need to be unknown outcomes.

Doing a Before Action Report and creating a Success Spectrum can document and sort all the ways the project could have positive impact, and at what points can the team claim a success.

3. Clear underlying assumptions

Don’t just document the process and potential outcomes, also be clear about the underlying assumptions and background context of each innovation investment. Ask questions like:

  • Does the experiment require teams to follow or flout rules?
  • Are there unaccounted resources, like volunteer team members?
  • Can this innovation only exist in specific enabling environments?

4. Small Scale Innovations

A key aspect of intelligent failure is to make sure that companies budget and time for no-stress experiments that will not harm the organization. Something like a 10% of projects by number or value.

This is large enough to get staff attention and motivation, new enough that investors will want to support it, but small enough that failure of any one project, or even groups of them, will not cause undue stress for corporate leadership.

5. Experiments Relevant to All Teams

Companies need to make sure the context of the innovation is familiar enough to the relevant teams that it can create effective diagnosis of the failures and teams can adopt the lessons learned.

This is why I always design Fail Festivals to be organizationally diverse, bringing in staff from different levels and backgrounds so that each participant can see themselves in at least on presenter.

6. Asses early and often

I really like the intelligent failure point of assessing the innovation early and often at specific checkpoints. These pause-and-reflect sessions should be identified in advance to allow teams to quickly identify whenever the activity is diverging from the original plans.

Not all divergence is bad, and not every change means failure. If a company did a Before Action Report, then these inconsistencies can be anticipated and mitigated in real time.

7. Lessons learned are quickly shared

Along with assessing pilot projects early and often, organizations can develop a culture of innovation by talking about how teams learn from failure.

The goal is to establish failure as healthy for a company and get past thinking of failure as a catastrophic event. Failure is nuanced and failure – a sibling of success – requires risk tolerance for innovation.

Events

5 Ways to Talk About Failure at Your Work

talk about failure at work

I recently led a Fail Festival for Grantmakers In Aging’s annual conference. It was wonderful to participate in-person again after hosting virtual Fail Fests during the pandemic.

GIA is a community of funders mobilizing money and ideas to strengthen resources for us, as we age. They were excited for their members to speak about their failures in supporting older adults and how we can all learn to speak about failure in our organizations.

5 Ways to Talk About Failure at Work

I was honored when their CEO brought forth four ideas from the Fail Festival in her keynote presentation to close the conference. She inspired many members to reflect on their organization’s culture and adopt these themes.

1. Recognize and Accept Failure

Life and Fail Festivals teach us that failure happens. Failure is multifaceted, nuanced, and occurring right now in each of our organizations. We all know it. Now accept it. Then talk about it and learn from it.

Your organization does not need to have a Fail Fest each year to recognize that failure happens and to learn from it. The point is not to celebrate failure for the sake of a good laugh. We want to celebrate failure as innovation and learning.

2. Honestly Talk About Failure

We should all do a better job of talking about failure openly in our organizations. There are many ways to do this.

  • We can start by being more honest with our staff.
  • We can be more accepting with grantees and partners.
  • We can even have our own internal Fail Fests.

Whatever method we choose, the Fail Fest concept should give you strength to take calculated risks, to think big, invest in the big leaps moving us all in a new direction.

3. Encourage Innovations

How can we encourage innovation in our own organizations? In our partners and grantees? Here is an idea: fail small, fast, and open.

Set up and fund experiments – too small for log frames or onerous reporting requirements, but large enough to try out an idea. Then shower your innovators with these grants. The only requirement is to honestly, openly test a specific theory of change and document the results.

Do not anticipate success with all the ideas that you invest in. In fact, expect multiple failures, just like a venture capitalist. Invest in the ideas that work, don’t sweat the ideas that do not.

Crucially, have everyone present their idea and result publicly – so we can also learn faster.

4. Demand a Minimum Level of Failure

If failure is a mark of innovation and risk taking, then we should be demanding a minimum level of failure as a proxy for how innovative an organization is.

Say something like a 10% of projects by number or value.

This is large enough to get staff attention and motivation, new enough that donors and funders will want to support it, but small enough that failure of any one project, or even groups of them, will not cause undue stress for organizational leadership.

5. Make Learning from Failure a Norm

Now along with accepting failure, we should expect the organization to show it learned from that failure – in that project and in their activities overall. And be public about it.

The goal is to establish a level of failure as healthy for the overall philanthropic community – for us, and for donors, and the public in general. So we can get past failure-as-catastrophic mindset and into thinking of failure as risk tolerance in innovation.

In fact, the point of Fail Festival events is to show that failure is an option and it is acceptable – today and throughout the year

Events

Learning from Failure Virtually – Online via Zoom

learning from failure zoom

For many years, I’ve focused on in-person Fail Festival sessions. Either as big events onto themselves, or as the keynote presentation in an annual conference or signature event.

I love the humanity of connecting presenters to their audience in real life with every participant feeling a keen sense of connection with the speakers and each other. The casual conversations after Fail Festivals often bring forth new and exciting connections, with people saying things like:

  • “Oh my God! I am living your presentation right now – failing in a key project. How can I turn our program around?”
  • “Wow, I think I’m about to start an activity that looks just like the one you spoke about. What can I do to change our trajectory?”
  • “You were speaking the truth in your talk. I’ve done that exact failure at work, but I’ve been too embarrassed to talk about it for years now. Thank you for giving voice to my experience.”

Virtual Fail Festival Events

Recently, I was challenged by Philea, the Philanthropy Europe Association, to create a virtual Fail Festival for their team.

Philea is a pan-European platform for foundations, philanthropic organisations and networks to share best practices across the continent.  The foundation is based in the Netherlands. Their team works across Europe. I am based in the USA. An online event was our only option.

This was not my first virtual Fail Festival. I’ve done online events for years now – starting well before the pandemic. However, I do want to share how the concept of learning from failure has universal application, regardless of location.

This event was a success even over video collaboration software.

4 Lessons Learned from Failing Online

Online events obviously have a different experience than in-person events. There are also many guides on how to do a successful virtual event. Therefore, I’m going to focus specially on the four lessons learned for Fail Festival events.

1. Create a Clear Agenda and Objectives

I always meet with the failure presenters multiple times before an event – its one of my key services – and this is even more important for online events where speakers often don’t directly communicate with each other just before speaking.

Participants also need to know the detailed agenda, the Fail Festival objectives, and how they are expected to act and interact during the session. Specifically to be attentive, stay focused on the speaker, and show both by keeping their camera on.

2. Promote Interaction and Engagement

When participants are looking at their screens for an online event, there is great temptation to multi-task if the presenter isn’t captivating – and sometimes, even when they are!

Three tricks I employ to keep participants engaged is to:

  • Ask them to turn off notifications and email alerts, the worst offenders to deep concentration. Best if they can close all their applications expect Zoom, Teams, Meet, etc.
  • Be sure that speakers build audience participation into their talk by doing pop quizzes, open questions, and good jokes. Nothing makes people tune in like hearing everyone laugh and not knowing why.
  • Call on people to share their experiences that are similar to the presenter. This needs to be coordinated in advance – I don’t like putting people on the spot – but when done right, it makes all participants listen harder, thinking they might be called on too.

3. Ensure Diverse and Inclusive Leaders

I always design Fail Festivals to be organizationally diverse, bringing in staff from different levels and backgrounds so that each participant can see themselves in at least on presenter.

When going online, its even more important to ensure geographic diversity to show that each region is engaged, and not just headquarters.

This also means that not everyone may be comfortable in the same language, even if it is the official language of the organization. I take extra care working with non-native English speakers to ensure their terms and expressions will translate to native speakers as they intend.

4. Incorporate Social Time

One of the most effective team building tools during Fail Festivals is to simply allow the teams to spend time together. This is harder over online platforms, but still possible with good facilitation.

Especially when the CEO, Executive Director, or Board Chair has presented their failure first, creating psychological safety for everyone else to be honest about failure.

Once “the boss” shows that failure is indeed an option, then other staff feed embodied to share their own challenges and mistakes, helping the team improve their work as a whole.

Events

Small Business Owners Learning from Fail Festival SBLC 2021

Small Business

It’s time for a Fail Festival – a celebration of failure as a mark of leadership and innovation in pushing the boundaries of what is possible and profitable.

The 10th Annual Small Business Leadership Conference, presented by the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship, part of the Florida State University College of Business, is on a mission to make failure acceptable in small business discussions.

There is great value in examining our mistakes and learning from failure as we go beyond the easy and the simple.

Three panelists will join Keynote Speaker Wayan Vota to talk about their past business fails and lessons learned for future success at the Thursday Keynote Session.

Then we’ll open up the discussion for audience participation and hear about failure they have had in business either before or during the pandemic, how they overcame, and why their failure shaped them for success in their current or new business.

Events

Creating a Safe Space for Failure

houston we have a problem

Most conference programs focus on success stories and examples of leaders who have taken the right path to get positive results. Those kinds of case studies make sense. After all, attendees want to recreate those positive outcomes for themselves and their organizations.

That’s the opening paragraph for Creating a Safe Space for Failure, by David McMillin for PCMA, the world’s largest, most respected and most recognized network of business events strategists.

In the article, David quotes me speaking about Fail Festivals:

“Everyone enjoys talking about successes and how great they are,” Wayan Vota, a failure festival consultant, told Convene. “That’s good marketing fluff, but it’s hard to learn from successes. The presenters are so focused on making it sound like a success that they gloss over the issues and the stumbling blocks they faced,” he said.

But “real learning comes when you talk about what didn’t go right. I usually coach presenters to think of the failure that moved them to change the way they work or live,” Vota said.

Read more here.