Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are
failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of
change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I
almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in
international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear
all change.
I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts
was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's
excellent online document depository to foster learning.
I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the
status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.
The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started–not the number that have succeeded. In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.
What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?
Comments
2 responses to “Seth’s mad at the “non-profits” and the situation is worse than he thinks”
My fear with this post (and also with Seth Godin’s) is that readers will come away thinking that we need to “innovate”, create something new…
It seems to me that while many aid/development practitioners preach and (sort of) agree on the need for change and innovation, most of the ACTUAL innovations which we see being proposed and promoted fall into one of two unfortunate categories:
1) Technical innovations that don’t really (or only a little) advance effective programming. All of the specialized GIK: the collapsable housing, the plumpy’nut, using cell phones to text message monitoring data to central mainframes via satellite… They’re interesting, they’re fun, they’re cool.. but at the end of the day very few of them actually help us deliver aid more effectively or more efficiently. What we really need is far less innovative (and less sexy): internet that works 24/7… (more thoughts on this: http://talesfromethehood.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/when-not-to-innovate/)
2) Innovations that are really about marketing and fundraising. This is what I see Seth’s post really talking about. And while it’s all well and good enough (who could possibly be against more fundraising for relief and development work?), those innovations tend to be driven by marketers and fundraisers – not development professionals. Which too often leads to…http://informationincontext.typepad.com/good_intentions_are_not_e/2009/10/deceptive_advertising.html
I think we’d want to clarify that the change needed is really more around everyone doing following best-practices all the time, not cutting corners (even where donors themselves are slack), perhaps even regulation of the aid sector.
Yes, there is a real danger in innovating for the sake of innovation. One of the development businesses greatest weaknesses is the lack of objective criteria for measuring effectiveness. A for-profit business could try introducing the “specially manufactured collapsible relief housing” that you mentioned in your blog and if no one bought them, they would know they failed. However, our customers don’t fund us and our donors don’t receive our benefits. It is much harder to judge if a new innovation is better than the old technique.
I’ve never worked for an organization that was innovating so fast that they lost track of the basics. Instead, I see organizations that keep doing the same thing because they don’t bother to try to keep up with innovations.
As you wrote, Seth is focused on innovations in marketing–building tribes to support our work. My rant was based on bad experience with organizations that ignore the new possibilities offered through blogs, twitter, and facebook. You’re right, Kiva blew it. They innovated too fast and didn’t pay attention to the basics. I wish there were more groups like Kiva that are pushing the limits and making mistakes so that we can all learn from it and improve.