The Loudest question that we at BRAC are asked when working on our annual Failure Report is always: “Why not just call it a learning report?”
After years of writing this report, we have noticed that the aversion to mention the word ‘failure’ still persists. The word remains stigmatised, and we are adamant that we must break this framing.
We must do so because ‘we failed, but we will learn from this’ should not be a scary thing to say. Sure, failure has costs – but until we have tried an approach and failed, we can never say that we have true contextual proof that something will not work.
The far bigger risk, according to us, is playing it safe. Without daring to fail, there is no real innovation, or change. Thus, we must keep trying and failing, and we must keep learning and innovating.
Failure does not denote the end of the story. Every failure represents a chance to do better.
As an organisation with innovation at the centre of its work, there is no choice but to encourage failing fast and failing forward. The goal of these reports has historically been to highlight that even organisations as large as BRAC run into failure from time to time.
In fact, we want to say that it has to do so.
No one can claim to have achieved great change without daring to risk failure. This year, we will take you through four stories. Some stories are about us missing the mark in brave new attempts. Some are about us learning big things from small mistakes. All of them are important to share.
Our hope is that this Failure Report will guide you to not repeat the same mistakes. But you probably will fail in other ways. Because if you want to be innovators, fail you must, learn you must, and share you must.
The introduction to the BRAC Failure Report for 2023.