Contemporary philanthropy is quite fond of failure. I’ve heard talks about positive failure at every philanthropy/social innovation conference I’ve been to in the past five years. Except unlike the engineers who anticipate failure as a way of overcoming it, the social innovation crowd can sometimes romanticize failure in its own right.

Nobody wants to fail. June Wang said it best: “Most people don’t put “fail” on [their] bucket lists.” Rather, the ‘fail forward’ culture is about learning how not to fail on the next attempt. Warren Buffett famously said that “failure isn’t failure” in philanthropy. It’s OK for 80% of initiatives to fail, he said, so long the 20% that succeed change “millions of lives” for the better. In this view, failure is necessary because while we may know that some initiatives will succeed, we can’t know exactly which ones will work until we try them all.

The embrace of failure isn’t about losing: it’s about finding success through experimentation.

To those who will say that failure is an inevitable part of progress in philanthropy, ask yourself this: how many major triumphs can philanthropy show for each of vaunted failure? Are we succeeding 20% of the time? 10% of the time? Do our successes outweigh our failures? Where is the progress that vindicates the failures?

Read the source article at medium.com