An Amazing TED Talk on the Power of Embracing Failure

After last week’s post on what the global development industry can learn from software developers we received a lot of positive feedback and traffic. In that post, we outlined 4 ways that we can embrace failure to increase the speed of innovation and growth:

1. Plan for Failure
2. Test (and design) for Failure
3. Fail Fast (and rebuild… again… and again… and again…)
4. Share your Failure (and success)

As you can probably guess, the last blog post outlined the benefits of embracing failure. To follow-up on that post, I was informed of this video which is well worth watching. It’s called “Learning From Failure“, and it shares a story about how Engineers Without Borders embraced its failure to improve its organization, and ultimately, accelerate global development.

My favorite quote:

What if we funded the development sector like Venture Capitalists funded startups. What would it be like if a donor funded projects and expected four of them to do OK, one of them to do fantastic, and five of them to fail?