Go On, Hug a Failure

Back in June, I blogged about a meeting with Dr Maura O’Neill Chief Innovation Officer at USAID, and a very interesting discussion of the importance of learning from failure.  The possibility of a USAID FailFaire –or even Fail Summit— was mooted.  We’re not quite there yet.  And maybe we won’t be until there’s a grand bargain on foreign assistance and/or until the debt negotiation freeze’s over.  But thanks to Wayan Vota at Inveneo, there is going to be a DC FailFaire at the World Bank on October 13th.  It’s not just an opportunity to hear about that one time when one little World Bank project went just a bit wrong.  Everybody who takes a risk fails once in a while –just ask Donald Trump.  So, attend DC FailFaire, share a failure, learn from it, receive absolution –and go out and fail again! (Well, hopefully not the last bit).  I can’t be there, sadly –which is a shame, because I could have shared my complete failure to sell more than three copies of a book which was all about failure in ICT for development projects.  Oh, the bitter, bitter irony.