A charity just admitted that its program wasn’t working. That’s a big deal.

This piece is about a theme dear to my heart: failure. Every individual and organisation will face failure at some point, so it is worth deciding in advance how you'll respond to it. Will you get defensive and avoid the realities? Or accept it, learn and adapt?

The danger inherent in any institution, charities included, is that they may begin to value their own survival over achieving their stated aims. They might sweep failures under the rug. But failure is necessary for innovation. We have to be willing to get it wrong in order to find new ways of working and new responses to old problems. It's why friends and I started a 'Fail Club' in Auckland a few years back. We learned a lot of lessons through that, about the different types of failure and the importance of self-compassion.

It's easy to say "fail fast, fail early", but it's much harder to practise it, especially in a large organisation. But there's no point doing evaluation if you're not open to learning about what you could have done better. This piece is also especially relevant in light of calls for an Evaluator-General in Australia.