This article is written by Sam Peinado, a product designer at VMware, formerly at Mahindra & Mahindra in Mumbai. He is based in NYC.
It’s widely acknowledged that failure is the fuel of innovation, and yet it remains stigmatised in government — and for good reason. Government is not the same as a Silicon Valley startup. The goals are different, the cultures are different, and perhaps most importantly, the appetite for risk is different.
And yet the expectations on government seem to have increased in recent decades. Civil servants are being called upon to perform ever greater feats, to solve even more complex problems, sometimes in bleeding edge domains, while the public continues to demand that they get everything right the first time_._ When the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention developed new Ebola guidance in response to an ongoing, unprecedented crisis, they were widely criticised for a “chaotic response.” When it took time to work out the bugs in the US’ new centralised health insurance portal, the media response was so blistering that the entire legislative program behind it was put in jeopardy.
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In our hyper-networked world, hunger for a scandal has never been higher, even as expectations of government continue to rise. Yet there is no improvement without making mistakes. Cue the consultants: a veritable army of well-meaning advice-givers has emerged to tell government that they need to learn to “fail forward” in order to meet the needs and pace of the 21st century. Civic innovators exhort government agencies to “fail faster.” BCG’s Centre for Public Impact is organising a FailureCon. Even Apolitical agrees.
And with good reason. It’s true that high performance and agile response require an openness to learning from failure. The private sector has known this for decades (though they also struggle to put it into practice), at least since Thomas Edison’s classic lightbulb quip: "I haven't failed — I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
The benefits of failure that pundits are preaching isn’t actually about the failure itself. It’s about the learning that results from failure
But what this discourse misses is that having the space to fail, then learn from it, and do better next time (without ruining your reputation) is a form of privilege.
It’s a privilege that people of colour typically don’t have, and it’s also a privilege that government typically doesn’t have. Part of this is just human nature. The expectation of excellence can be a barrier to change, which means it can be a barrier to improvement. If what government most values is “keeping the trains running on time,” it’s implicit they would frown on one of those trains being late, even if it was because of a good faith attempt at improvement. That disapproval also makes it hard to learn from why the train was late so it won’t happen again.
It’s not about failing more
But government has a different mandate than business. The public sector isn’t trying to turn a profit. They need to establish and maintain the safety and welfare of residents. It’s not realistic or appropriate for government to spend 10% of its budget on high-risk bets. So why do pundits and thought leaders keep harping on how government needs to fail more? Is innovation from failure even possible in government?
It is, and you don’t have to risk being scorched on the nightly news to pull it off. The only thing you need is a willingness to be vulnerable with your coworkers (admittedly, perhaps a scarier prospect). The benefits of failure that pundits are preaching isn’t actually about the failure itself. It’s about the learning that results from failure. And it turns out you don’t have to fail more in order to get that benefit. All you need to do is gently shift the culture of how your team or department treats failures that already exist.
You can start small. One way to get your team talking about failure in a productive, nonjudgmental way is to use a technique called the Futures Wheel. Used by agencies as diverse as the New Zealand executive branch and the US Forest Service, the Futures Wheel workshop centres around the unforeseen consequences of a new intervention or macro trend.
Ask yourself, would you rather fail to learn? Or learn from failure, safely?
For example, as part of a public health agency, you might do a Futures Wheel workshop to discuss the consequences of expanding a program on smoking cessation or how the rise of e-cigarettes will impact the agency’s constituents. As a team, you get together, write the change or trend in the central bubble, then brainstorm the consequences of that trend, and the consequences of those consequences (how-to guide and more context here).
It’s a great way to think through potential missteps before they happen. A Futures Wheel takes the stigma out of talking about failure because no one is to blame. The failure hasn’t happened yet. All you’re doing is imagining it, together, so that you can learn from the potential failure before it puts you on the front page of the Times.
Blameless retrospectives
If your team is more kum-ba-yah than finger-pointy, you might consider something a little more socially challenging: a blameless retrospective. The blameless retrospective is a meeting about a problem or incident that works to bring everyone involved to a common understanding of what led up to the issue, what the response was, and to identify opportunities for improvement, all with the goal of preventing the issue from happening again (how-to guides here and here).
They were popularised in the tech world by site reliability engineers (SREs), the folks whose entire professional existence is focused on preventing things like healthcare portal meltdowns. Blameless retrospectives can help governments benefit from failure because they don’t require agencies to put themselves out there and take a risk.
All they require one to do is to take a careful look at the inefficiencies and mistakes that already happen in the ordinary course of administration. A blameless retrospective doesn’t involve public relations risk, only perhaps some internal reputation risk. But chances are, if you run the workshop well, everyone involved will be more excited by the potential for improvement than disapproving of any mistakes that were made. If there’s any doubters, remind them of the Prime Directive:
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
These are just a couple ways that government can get started innovating from failure without running risky pilots or moonshot experiments. There are more advanced methods too, from Value Stream Mapping for improving the efficiency of an existing program to Service Prototyping for reducing the risk of a new program. There is even a consultancy that helps governments develop a failure-friendly culture. If you want to take things to the next level, consider joining the Residency for a sounding board and a support system.
Even on their own, however, these two techniques can get you started with the most important enabler of innovation, building the “psychological safety” that allows teams to learn from failure and improve. Ask yourself, would you rather fail to learn? Or learn from failure, safely? — Sam Peinado
This article is part of a series written by members of The Residency, a global learning collective of public servants, civil society and social designers and innovators. The Residency exists to spark curiosity, nurture lifelong learning and to provide a space for shared learning across disciplines and sectors. Click here to read more and see how to join.
(Picture credit: Unsplash)
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