Learning From Failure by Leah Goldstein Moses

Success in the affairs of life often serves to hide one's abilities, whereas adversity frequently gives one an opportunity to discover them.      - Horace A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Girl Scouts USA on an evaluation of the Uniquely ME! program. Designed to help girls build self-esteem and positive body image, the program targeted girls in communities without a strong Girl Scout presence, often in urban or low-income communities. One of our evaluation methods was “success case studies”; in other words, we identified Girl Scout Councils achieving great results, and did in-depth studies of how their programs worked, what resources they used, and any lessons they could share with other councils. Over the last few months, there has been an on-going discussion on an evaluation listserv* about learning from failure, and it’s made me think back on those success case studies. Did the struggling Councils have just as much to teach as those that were succeeding? I’m convinced that failure has a lot to teach, including:

1. What circumstances make it harder to be successful, and therefore what we should try to temper before we get started
2. What to avoid in the future, or what just doesn’t work
3. What we could do differently next time around

The question is, how can we learn from failure without making people FEEL like failures? One way we sometimes do this is by asking our clients to nominate interview or case study participants from three distinct groups – the “stars” that have really thrived in their program; those that have seen more typical, or average success, and those that have struggled. We often ask our clients to not tell us which participants fall in which group, so that we don’t have pre-conceived ideas ahead of time. In one recent evaluation for a technology collaborative serving dozens of school districts, we used this approach and the findings ultimately helped the collaborative see how different messages and training models would work with different groups. We were able to minimize shame or resistance by asking people to self-nominate to describe what they do, and do NOT, like about integrating technology. Participants characterized their own use as well.