It’s not a great video. But do listen to the whole thing…

It’s been fun, ladies and gentlemen. But now it’s time to say ‘good-bye.’

This is the last time that I’ll post, here at Tales From the Hood.

I’ll keep the site up and the comments threads open, at least for now. I will also keep my Gmail account open (I promise to read, but not necessarily respond to every message) and my twitter account active.

It has truly been my pleasure to write for you all for the past several years. Some of you are close friends with whom I look forward to remaining in contact.

The rest of you may see me around the aid blogosphere as a guest blogger from time to time. Or maybe in a life-saving coordination meeting or expat party in a disaster zone near you…

Happy Trails!

Here’s the fifth tune in the playlist:

A modern day warrior

mean, mean stride

Today’s Tom Sawyer

mean, mean pride

I once asked rhetorically whether or not aid blogging matters. Now I’m telling you straight up:

It matters. It matters a lot.

The conversation about what international development and aid are, what makes them effective, how they should be done, and what they’re capable of accomplishing is dominated by simplistic, happy, and  occasionally even plain dishonest messaging about how this NGO or that is eradicating hunger or making poverty history.

It’s not that I or anyone else wants to be known as “negative” or “cynical.” But right now independent blogs like the ones in my extended blog roll are the only place where you can consistently count on an unfiltered alternative to the meticulously crafted stories that you get from branded NGO websites, blogs, and published reports. Or, similarly, to those usually too-long, over-edited, jargon-intensive and generally LAMEified summaries coming out of those famous life-saving high-level workshops and forums where intelligentsia and aristocracy gather to discuss “the bottom of the pyramid.” No, it’s not that we want to be negative or angry or cynical as a matter of principle. It’s not that everything said within the hallowed halls of the HRI-affiliates is wrong or inaccurate or suspect, or that everything said on aid blogs is spot on. But vibrant, diverse discussion adds value by definition and is a good thing as a matter of principle.

The whole blogging thing may seem too messy, too emotive, too unfocused for you. The aid blogosphere may feel like and maybe even be so much opinion, conjecture, hearsay, assuming facts not in evidence. It may annoy you, all the cynicism and negativity. It may make you plain angry.  You may hope and pray for the day when this reality will change, but until the aid industry gets past its own dogma and NGOs get past their fears of internal diversity of thought, these blogs do matter.

Oh, and before you condescendingly wonder how I can ever find the time, or go on about how you’re too busy working to waste time blogging, let me just say: everyone finds the time for what they think is important. Some of you follow sports or collect stamps. Some of us blog.

Though his mind is not for rent

don’t put him down as arrogant

His reserve, a quiet defense

Riding out the day’s events…

I get it. The real world is about give and take, about compromise, about finding middle ground. Fair enough.

In my day-to-day work I am committed to finding those workable compromises – without compromising the bottom lines of what makes good aid good aid; to engaging in the give-and-take in a collegial way. At any given time there are multiple, contingent and competing realities. I do get this. I am not naïve. I get that humanitarian work, at least as we know it now, requires the architecture of an organization behind it, and that both the work and the organization(s) require resources in order to continue existing, and that those resources have to come from somewhere.

But let’s just be very clear:  This all as may be, the way things currently are in the aid industry is not the way that they should be. The natural tendency of the industry is not toward good aid.  The political economy of this industry just wants to favor someone other than the poor. And left alone, that’s what it will do. All of which means, in my opinion, that no matter where any of us sits in the humanitarian industry, whether we’re on the front line handing out food parcels to disaster survivors, or buried deep in the bowels of HQ, managing spreadsheets and sending life-saving emails, it is our job – every single one of us – to be steering our spheres of influence in the direction of “the way things should be.”

Yes, I understand that at the level of individual inter-departmental or inter-agency transactions we have to cut deals and compromise. But in all areas and at all levels of our industry right now the status quo is simply not good enough.

I don’t care who you are, if you work for or are in some other way affiliate yourself with an NGO of any size, if you claim for yourself the title of humanitarian, then it is your job to move the needle towards the way things should be.

What you say about his company

Is what you say about society

Catch the mist, catch the myth

Catch the mystery, catch the drift

Maybe you think that all of us aid bloggers are just a bunch of stuck-up elitists hiding behind our computers, out of touch with how the real world works? (Well, you’re wrong about me hiding behind my computer. I get out in it on a regular basis.) But I am an elitist, absolutely. I see no reason to compromise on the principles of good aid. Maybe my views create an inconvenience for you. Maybe you don’t like what I have to say or how I say it.

Maybe you think my tone is too harsh or (heaven forbid) snarky. Okay, fair enough – I sometimes shout into the void here. I don’t mind admitting that after a day or a week or a month of playing all nice, whether in in-house strategery or coordination meetings in the field, I need a space where I can crank the volume up to 11.

But this doesn’t make me wrong.

No his mind is not for rent

To any god or government

Always hopeful, yet discontent

He knows changes aren’t permanent

But change is…

We all have our own intellectual lives that extend beyond the logos on our namecards. Mission statements are words. Organizations, like their taglines, come and go. But the humanitarian imperative remains.

Discontent with the way things are in the industry is not the same as disloyalty to an organization, and different still from unwillingness to perform. Most real aid workers that I know would rather spend a few rounds of cynical, self-deprecating pub-based reflection than go to a company pep-rally. Seriously, the sports metaphors and high-fiving leave us cold. But that doesn’t mean we’re not on board with the program.

Discontent? Sure, we have some of that. But if we weren’t at least a little bit hopeful, we wouldn’t be here.

Here’s the third tune in the playlist:

This ain’t no disco
It ain’t no country club either
This is LA!

Articles like this one used to annoy me for reasons that I couldn’t quite pin down and articulate well. Now I’m in touch with my reasons, and articles like this just make me chuckle:

Getting involved in aid and development: Businesses can do much to aid development but approaches should be carefully considered before jumping in.

It’s not than anything harmful is being proposed. It’s not that the suggestions are wrong or bad (they’re actually pretty sensible, mostly). And in this rare instance, it’s not even aid elitism (which, as you know by now, I very cheerfully embrace . This is a profession, not a hobby.. don’t get me started…).

But all I wanna say is, guys, have some fun. It’s good.. great.. awesome, even, that you want to “tune into local realities”, or provide a “retail/charity option that allows consumers to do something positive while going about their daily lives…”

But let’s be very clear: this is not aid. It is not development. You are not alleviating poverty in the third world or mitigating the effects of conflict or natural disaster. You are simply being a responsible citizen. In today’s hyper-aware, cause-marketed, extreme-emotional-need-for-politically-correct-expression world, we’re too often too quick to conflate “not raping the helpless” with “making the world a better place.”

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard 

There are many, many good things that you can do. You can recycle. You can learn another language. You can invite your neighbor of another socio-cultural and/or ethno-linguistic demographic over for lunch. You can offer to babysit the child of the single mom next door so she can run errands. You can drink only free-trade coffee. You can give $5.00 to the homeless person you pass in the tube station every day on the way to work. You can own a hybrid car. You can slap a “COEXIST” bumper sticker on your hybrid car. You can ride a bicycle to work. You can eat less meat. You can wear less leather. You can burn your Justin Timberlake CDs and only ever listen to Indie bands.

All good things to do.

But some of you need to relax a little. Relief and development work are actual professions. Don’t try to do them in your spare time. And perhaps even more importantly, don’t feel as if you have to. It’s okay to just live your life in a simply responsible manner without trying to spin a contorted and over-the-top theory of how you’re “supporting aid work” or “making the world more equitable.” Do driving the speed limit, parking legally and not shoplifting make you “part of law enforcement”? Of course not. They simply make you a law-abiding citizen.

Or do you feel the need to spend your summer vacation volunteering at a gynecological clinic? Or at Legal Aid? No? Exactly.

It’s okay to spend your vacation abroad as responsible tourist. And I mean real tourist, not voluntourist. Have fun. Don’t try to play aid worker for two weeks or two months. Just go and have fun. The world is an interesting place, filled with interesting people. Enjoy it. Enjoy it without the burden of feeling like you have to do something that you’re not qualified to do (seriously – you’re not qualified).

All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one

If humanitarian aid or development work are what you really want to do with your life, fine – make the commitments and investments necessary to make this your career, your life. Otherwise, seriously, just go have fun. Responsibly.

I like a good beer buzz early in the morning…

Sheryl Crow is a total aid worker…

Here’s the second tune in the playlist:

This one’s easy: I think that we are all far too anxious to declare aid successes or failures far too soon.

Who knew that Axel Rose would have the answer?

Said woman take it slow
It’ll work itself out fine
All we need is just a little patience
Said sugar make it slow
And we’ll come together fine
All we need is just a little patience
Patience, patience, patience
Ooh, oh, yeah…

I really like Jacqualine Novogratz’s description of “patient capital.” (read her interview on Social Edge). As I analyze it, she’s basically talking about two age-old “good aid” ideas kind of rolled into one.

1)      Look at aid outcomes in the terms of those we’re intending to help (“the poor”).

2)      Take the time that’s needed.

We’re talking about peoples lives and, importantly, their ways of life, here. How quickly does change happen in your organization? At your institution? In your family? Yeah? It doesn’t happen quickly in “the field”, either.

This stuff takes time. Yes, I get that donor funding cycles and life-of-project realities mean that we have to try to talk about results before they’re all the way ripe or describe progress that can’t really be measured yet. But as humanitarian aid practitioners, it’s our job to see past funding cycles. The rhythms of change in the communities where we work are not based on annual congressional statements, the European Commission’s budgeting process, or when the tax year ends for that wealthy area businessman who’s been a “strong supporter” for a long time.

Sure, aid is not perfect. And sure there’s room for improvement. But it works better than you think. But you have to give it time.

Just have a little patience.

Here’s the first tune in the playlist:

U2’s “One” sounds to me like a conversation between aid workers and beneficiaries about the issues in the aid system…

Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame

Sometimes aid is broken. Sometimes, no matter how badly aid donors or aid workers wish otherwise, change just doesn’t happen. We do our best and it’s not enough. Or maybe we’re just tired and can’t get it together.

Sometimes, no matter how abject things are “on the ground” or “in the field”, and no matter how well-planned the intervention is, it fails. Sometimes there is local resistance to aid. Sometimes it’s overt, “get the hell out!” Sometimes you can’t put your finger on it.

Everyone in the aid equation is culpable at one point or another.

Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without? 

Everyone – aid workers, beneficiaries – comes to the conversation with expectations that, in the end are not met. We expected each other to think differently, to act differently, to value and prioritize different things. And we were all disappointed, disillusioned at some point.

Well it’s…

Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light

Sometimes it’s good to analyze what’s happened before in order to clarify the way forward.. Sometimes, though, the past is just that: the past. Sometimes you just need to start from where you are right now and move on.

We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

Indeed.

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head?

Every aid worker on the planet comes to this line of work, in addition to whatever else, for personal reasons. Maybe we have a Jesus complex – we are going to save the poor from their poverty. Maybe we seek absolution from a dark past. Maybe it’s both of these and more.

Did I ask too much?
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it’s all I got

What do the poor deserve from us?

We’re one
But we’re not the same
Will we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again

Indeed.

We’ll continue doing humanitarian work. We’ll get it wrong. And sometimes we’ll get it right. And one day – who knows? – we’ll find ourselves as beneficiaries of aid programs run by those we once purported to help.

1) Someone pays for it. We call this person or entity a “donor.”

2) Someone else implements it. We call this person or entity an “aid provider” – usually, but not necessarily and NGO.

3) And someone else receives what the first one pays for and the second one implements. We call this person the “beneficiary”, usually for lack of a better term.

Some of us go on about the different kinds of donors, the extent to which their level of understanding and their motivations matter, what their rights are or should be in the grand scheme of things, or the extent to which they should be allowed to meddle in the workings of aid providers.

Some of us go on stridently about the different kinds of aid providers: Who should or shouldn’t be allowed to be one, what it takes to be a good one, the extent to which aid providers are or aren’t unduly influenced by the motivations of their donors, or the extent to which they should be required to share certain kinds of information.

Some of us go on passionately about the beneficiaries. What their rights are, what they can reasonably expect from donors and aid providers, what their capacities are, and the extent to which they have a role to play in the overall picture of aid.

These are vigorous, often vehement debates. And rightly so, as they all touch on important issues.

But just so that we’re all clear, none – not one – of these debates challenges the basic aid formula. None of these debates address in any substantial way the global reality of aid: that it is a giant ménage à trois between donors, aid providers and beneficiaries, each of whom approaches relationship with diverse needs and expectations, and where the aid providers’ role is primarily brokering the relationship between donors and beneficiaries.

And so you’ll forgive me, gentle reader, when I come off as more than just a tiny bit jaded with the rhetoric coming out of, say, the Cannes G20 summit. Or statements from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about their “innovative financing.” Or when I juxtapose what comes up when I click “draft agenda” for this year’s HLF-4 in Busan against the stated purpose of the forum “…review global progress in improving the impact and value for money of development aid and make new commitments to further ensure that aid helps reduce poverty…”

I get jaded because none of these forums or discussions addresses the basic nature of the aid formula. The ménage à trois. What the Gates Foundation calls “innovative financing”, isn’t. It’s simply the latest attempt to modify the parameters of how traditional donors work and maybe change up the kinds of strings attached to donor funding. It’s also the basis for a lot of HRI-style workshops and meetings and junkets. If you want truly innovative financing for foreign aid, find a way to pay for it that doesn’t involve donors. Simple as that.

Or bringing together 2,000 representatives from around the world to review the Paris and Accra declarations for the purpose of making development aid more effective.  Am I the only one who reads “High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness” as an oxymoron on multiple levels? For one, 2,000… coming together… to make progress on aid effectiveness… wait.. what? For another, the key to aid effectiveness is not something about the legal frameworks of a bunch of developed countries. This is focus on but one of the members of the torrid little aid ménage à trois. You want aid effectiveness on some kind of global scale, you have to deal with all three.

If you want to truly change the way aid works, you need to find a way to change the ménage à trois formula. PPP and CSR are just new kinds of donors. Mixing bilateral aid with traditional development aid, government to government capacity-building, and all of that simply adds complexity around who is a donor, who is a provider, and who is a beneficiary at the ground level. Technological and programmatic innovations (awesome as they might be) simply re-tool the ways in which aid providers continue business as usual. Humanitarian accountability and basic good process are “musts” (and I sincerely believe that they make aid better). But let’s not delude ourselves into believing that they confer any real change in status to the benefiaries of aid.

You want to be “game changing”? Find a way to change up the ménage à trois. Otherwise, you’re simply using new words to describe the same ol’.

* * *

It was during the first few days of a trip to Cambodia in October of 1999 that I was at a remote health station in Kompong Thom Province leading a small technical team comprised of a community health consultant and two expatriate colleagues based in Phnom Penh. It was one of those clear, intense, very hot days that you sometimes in see in Southeast Asia during the late rainy season. My itinerary from Washington D.C. had been tiresome: layovers in Chicago and Los Angeles, and an overnight stop in Bangkok, but with not quite enough time to sleep before checking in two hours early for a 7:00 am flight to Phnom Penh. Three days later I was still fighting 12-hour jet-lag and general fatigue. I was tired and cranky and hot and uncomfortable, in need of a shower, a square meal, and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

A muddy, pot-hole ridden, unpaved road was the only way in to the unremarkable health station. Inside it was a typical, quasi-open-air third-world clinic: Mosquito nets covered only about half of the windows. There was electrical power to only one or two rooms – one housed an ancient looking refrigerator and miscellaneous lab equipment, and another housed a couple of grimy PCs, presumably for keeping records. The two inpatient wards were just long rooms, each with 6 or so metal beds inside. No mattresses or bed clothing, just woven straw mats.

The general ward housed an assortment of wrinkled old people with I.V.s and bandages. Several recently delivered women occupied the maternity ward, breast-feeding newborn infants while assorted family members looked on. They looked exhausted. Flies buzzed through the open windows, the ground behind the laboratory was covered with disposable syringes, hypodermic needles and plastic packaging. The inside of the building had that smell so common in rural clinics in Southeast Asia in those days: a combination of body odor, sterile bandages, local cooking, and floors recently mopped with river water.

The director of the health station was also typical. He had once, perhaps only a year or two before, been energetic and full of desire to help the people of Kompong Thom, to be a part of the reconstruction of his country. Long days had run into long months and into years and the reality of probably never being invited to an administrative post in Phnom Penh had set in. He was also tired. Tired of the long hours, tired of explaining basic hygiene to illiterate peasants, tired of never having electricity to keep the few precious vaccines cold, tired of old malfunctioning equipment, tired of insufficient medicines, tired of working day after day and month after month with no perceptible improvement of any kind. Most of all – I could tell just from looking –  he was tired of Kompong Thom.

Kompong Thom and innumerable districts like it from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to the depressed remote regions of the Former Soviet Union to the backwaters of southern and southeast Asia are a nasty trick played upon energetic young medical students. They have dreams.  They will travel abroad for professional upgrading or possibly vacation. More often than not, however, they end up in places like Kompong Thom, far from the capital city, delivering babies in the middle of the night, dispensing ORS packets and explaining to iodine-deficient villagers why condoms are an effective means of preventing pregnancy.

And so, as the heat of the day was only beginning wane and the round tropical sun was only then beginning to dip towards the western horizon, and as we were only then beginning to move towards our vehicle having concluded our conversation with the tired health station director, I first saw her being carried into the health station by her mother. She was no more than four years old, emaciated (even for Cambodia in 1999), feverish, listless, lying limp in her mother’s arms. She was most likely suffering from dengue fever or possibly malaria (both were endemic there, at that time). Her mouth hung partially open, her limbs flaccid, her eyes glazed and beginning to roll up into her head. There had been patients straggling in and out of the health center the entire time that we were there, but I remember this little girl and her mother because we not only passed them on the way out the front door, but also stopped to talk with them. We – the director of the health center and our own health technical team – stopped to ask what was wrong with the little girl. How long had she been ill, what had the mother done? The little girl was obviously dying – her breathing was labored and she was barely able to keep her eyes open.

The doctor on our team agreed that without proper hospitalization she would most likely not last through the night. The mother had no money, no means of affording transportation to Phnom Penh. She had obviously spent too long doing the wrong things to care for her sick daughter: this visit to the health station was her last resort.

It would have been only about a three-hour ride to Phnom Penh and a facility able to treat the little girl. The sacrifice required by me to tell my local counterpart and the consultant that we needed to take them to Phnom Penh that evening would have been no more than a few hours’ sleep.

But I was tired, hot, stinky and dying for a bucket bath and an early retreat under the mosquito net. I was hungry. We were all ready to declare the work-day over. And in the end we simply left. We concluded our conversation, climbed back into the company white SUV and began easing back over the awful road to town.

* * * * *

I have long felt that as humanitarian workers we too often give in to the temptation to overstate our own importance. Too often we overestimate the value and the impact and the general “goodness” or “helpfulness” of what our organizations and programs and projects bring to the lives of those we genuinely want to help. And too often we overestimate our own individual roles in making those changes happen.

We – I include myself – take a measure of pride in our genteel poverty: we are not like our materialist peers in the for-profit sector. We are on the right sides of all the issues. We are making a difference. We sit in the comfort of our homes and offices, whether in suburban America, spotlessly clean Europe, or upscale neighborhoods and apartment complexes in “the field”, and we dole out paltry amounts relief in a desert of human suffering.

It is not that we should be endlessly self-critical. I truly believe that the work we do does accomplishes good. Real, objective good. But I am challenged to remain in a state of confident humility. We must not just sit and watch while the problems of our fellow humans go unattended. There is something called the humanitarian imperative. We must do something, and we must do it confidently. And we must do all of this humbly. If my own experience is at all representative – and I receive regular and consistent confirmation from other aid workers that it is – then we must go about the business of making the world a better place mindful of the fact that we are all still learning. We must keep in realistic perspective the limitations of what we have to offer, not just technically or intellectually, but as human beings, too.

When I look back on over two decades of humanitarian work, it is tempting to feel… almost pride. Pride in grants successfully won, targets successfully achieved, strategies successfully carried out, promotions successfully attained. And in those moments I am kept humble by the memory of a time when I had the ability to make a difference but did not. The image of a thin, brown child lying listless in the arms of a haggard mother under a sinking Cambodian sun remains with me still.

It’s been one of those moments of epiphany when the heavenly bodies align, everything is ensconced in a warm glow, and you feel… good.

Or maybe it’s been what addicts sometimes refer to as that fleeting “moment of clarity” (aid work is a drug, remember?) when things snap briefly into focus and you analyze with incisive lucidity where you are. One of those moments when your mind quickly cuts through the pfaffing and the window dressing and the packaging, and you see things as they really are, for better or for worse, laid bare.

Recently I spent several days in an excruciatingly poor place, beset with repeated natural disasters, doing one of those ‘life-saving monitoring visits.’ I won’t bore you with over-written anecdotes of bad roads or food that turns your insides into gurgling water, nor will I go on about the details of local culturally required (“exotic”) protocol that preceded each and every encounter of substance. There were some positively classic “stuff expat aid workers like” moments on the trip, but I will save those for the pub or the next tweetup.

I will simply say that the project I went to monitor is making a difference. A measurable, quantifiable difference.

For all of my jaded, verbosity about Brown Babies over at Hand Relief International, I can say with absolute confidence that the project I went to monitor is saving the lives of Brown Babies. I don’t mean to say that everything is awesome there, or that the next step will be cable television and BMWs for every family. But it is not an exaggeration to say in this instance that many infants and small children are alive in the targeted area today as a direct result of my local colleagues and their local partners pitching up and doing their jobs every day.

The numbers say that this project made a difference. And the people who’ve benefitted from this project also say that it made a difference.

It’s one of those moments that become far too few and far too far between as you work your way up the ranks in an international household charity. It’s one of those moments of intense gratification and even pride in the even small part that I can claim credit for contributing. It’s one of those moments when it comes clearly to you that international aid can and does work. This is what gets me out the door, bound for the office in the morning.

It’s one of those moments when you see that Alanna was dead on when she wrote (several times, actually) about how projects work, while grand theories and ivory tower pontification and abstracted debates.. er, not so much.

It’s one of those moments when you reconnect with the fact that the way to make a difference is to implement straightforward, by-the-book, unsexy relief and development. Local staff took the time needed to do this properly from the beginning; they followed good process; they listened to partners and beneficiaries; they didn’t bite off more than they could chew, programmatically speaking. They didn’t try waste the time of the poor with some goofy, irrelevant technology developed in a lab or garage by someone who’d never been to this place. No, this project made the difference that it did because it was planned and implemented the old-fashioned way. Again, I’m not saying it was perfect. But this project was first and foremost about the poor and their needs, right from day one.

It’s been one of those moments when I see with great precision what aid is, when I get how it works, and that it does work. Or at least can.

The industry and organizational dumbassery still exist. I’ll get back to ranting about #SWEDOW or bad marketing or volunteers soon enough. Don’t worry. But for now I’m basking in a moment of knowing, once again, what I’m doing here and why.

* * * * *

“Admitting failure” has been slowly gaining momentum for a few years, now, at least in the aid world. It’s one of those ideas whose time, as MJ correctly points out, is just around the corner. Much like all things “local”, like “sustainability” before that, and “evidence-based programming” before that, “admitting failure” is the sexy new relief and development language convention of the month, and as MJ further points out, is almost certain to become de rigeur in proposals, monitoring and evaluation reports, and NGO external publications within the foreseeable future.

What does this mean for practitioners of humanitarian relief and development? I think it means at least the following:

PR v. Organizational Learning: As I wrote in the comments thread beneath @ShotgunShack’s (really good) post on “Mainstreaming Complexity and Failure”, I think it’s important to remain clear in our own thinking about the distinction between “admitting failure” and “learning from mistakes.” The first is essential a public relations activity – something that I think we’ll be increasingly constrained to do simply as a matter of remaining citizens in good standing of the aid community. In the current discussion on admitting aid failure, though, there is a strong tendency to tacitly associate those admissions of failure on the one hand, with follow-through corrective action on the other. But as we all know, admitting mistakes and changing practice based on what is learned from mistakes are not at all the same things. If admitting failure is to be more than an exercise in conspicuous organizational humility, it will be up to us to link acknowledgement of failure with positive change.

The right level of analysis. Right now I don’t see a lot of focus in the “admitting failure” discussion on what exactly we’re to admit failure of. As those of us who have actually implemented relief and development programs in the field know, the failure of an activity (say, food for work) does not mean the failure of a project or program within which the failed activity is but one part. Or, conversely, it is also possible for individual activities to succeed where the overall program fails. The failure of one program does not mean that the overall effort in-country has failed. Which is different yet from a failure of the overall aid system. We will need to educate our constituents (what I have called “The Third Audience” on this blog) to understand these differences, and what failure at one level or in one area means – and importantly, does not mean – in others.

The danger of hyperbole. In many respects I see the call for aid providers to “admit failure” as backlash against the hyperbolic “dude, we can so make poverty history” language of the marketing and promotional material coming out of NGO communications and PR departments. And, perhaps ironically, the language of the “admit failure” discussion is similarly hyperbolic. Looking through what Wayan Vota describes as the 10 Levels of Failure, it seems to me that we are very often drawn to describe as “catastrophic failure” or “abject failure” what might in fact be only “version failure.” Or what might actually be what I’d call “lukewarm success.” Very few relief or development programs fully succeed or fully fail. Moreover, as I’ve written, even experts very often disagree on what success and failure mean, on what has succeeded versus what has failed.

While I wouldn’t see the term “admit failure” going away any time soon (and so we’ll be stuck using it), I think that the success in admitting failure, whether as a means of educating our constituents or of our own organizational learning, will depend on how well we move past hyperbolic language of “success” as well as “failure” into nuanced discussion about how to make things better.

Move away from simplistic marketing and communications. I have repeatedly over the past twenty years had the exact same conversation with communications and marketing colleagues. The upshot is that basically, in their view, the public – our donors – don’t want a drawn-out, nuanced discussion. Rather, they want simple, cut-and-dried facts in sound bite form. I honestly do not see how this perspective can survive a climate where NGOs are forced, either by legal requirement or the courts of public opinion, to admit failure. This is related to the above point: the NGO and aid world will have no choice but to find new ways of reaching out to their donor bases. The overly simplistic, happy-happy, headline-style marketing that pervades the aid world right now barely works. Once it is common practice for us to admit failure, simplistic marketing messages will stop working altogether.

Ethics and practicality. Thomas Edison is reported to have made some 9,000 attempts before succeeding at inventing the electric light bulb. But how many times should aid practitioners be allowed to fail at this kind of program or that before getting it right? How badly should an NGO have to fail before being barred from future practice? For how long should the mediocre success of a particular intervention be tolerated before being labeled “failure” and disallowed? While on one hand I acknowledge the value of learning from mistakes and sincerely applaud organizations like Engineers Without Borders for their nascent leadership within the industry to admit failure as a necessary part of that, on the other hand I do struggle to balance this against the conviction that what we do affects the lives and livelihoods of real people in very immediate, tangible ways. It may be state of the art in fields like engineering to celebrate failed attempts as learning. But once again, we’re dealing with people’s lives, here: ultimately the emphasis has to be more on the learning, less on the simple act of admission. More to the point, we have to be getting this stuff right or abandoning particular practices long before try number 9,000.