Failure, Design & Impact

Another social sector organization recently wrote a blurb on one of our projects at D-Rev. The title was “Learning from Failure”.

I laughed out loud. And cringed some.

The topic was Comet, a phototherapy device we prototyped for rural clinics in low-income regions. Technically, Comet was solid; the doctors who used it in field tests, loved it. But it didn’t fit our target facilities – we got some key assumptions wrong about the context. And it wasn’t the first time someone had called it a failure.

We didn’t see it as a failure at D-Rev. In fact, we wrote and talked about it fairly extensively. The project was rich with insights about healthcare infrastructures and decision-making in resource-poor clinics. We hoped our lessons would also be useful to other organizations trying to solve similar problems.

Good design process is testing ideas and iterating. Stanford’s Product Design program call this Express, Test, Cycle, ETC for short:

1. Express an idea, a potential solution.
2. Test it. This means really test it to try to find all the problems.
3. Then cycle – iterate – based on what you learn in testing.

From another angle it might look like trying and failing lots of times before the aha! solution. Or if you narrow the timescale perspective to one express and test, which is how many projects are judged in the social sector, it can look like a failure. The point of ETC is that you keep cycling, iterating or pivoting until you figure out a solution that works.

Here is an example of why the ETC approach is so important. Think of the assumptions you make when brainstorming solutions or designing a product: how skilled your users are, how consistently users behave across cultures, and so on. When we test our prototypes, we aren’t just testing the idea or prototype, but also the assumptions we have made. A device that meets the technical specifications may not solve the problem if even one of those assumptions is wrong. That was what happened with Comet.

Product development isn’t a straight line. It is circles and errors and scratching things out and rethinking angles. It’s ambiguity. It’s learning from users – learning where you got things right, and where you need to keep refining or rethinking – and testing again. No one gets a product to market, to users, to impact with a direct path, getting everything right. Tim Ring, the CEO of CR Bard, an S&P 500 medical technologies company, mentioned to me once that 80% of commercial health products are iterated again after market launch. As much as we encourage innovation in the social sector, institutional funding incentives are often stacked against it. For example, innovation competitions and grand challenges encourage validating – not testing – an idea. If you hear about projects that are moving forward without turns and setbacks, the organization is selectively disclosing information. And that’s not success, it’s a red flag. The social sector must align incentives with problem-solving – as messy as it is – and impact.

“Fail fast, fail often” is Silicon Valley’s favourite overused mantra. Yet we are confusing failure with learning. More accurate is “Test thoroughly, iterate repeatedly” - which is what ETC is about. Failure is getting something wrong and quitting. Worse though is getting something wrong and continuing down the same path, suspecting your solution may not work in practice. Embracing the learnings always results in critical insights about the problem you are trying to solve. With Comet, we recognized that one of the biggest barriers to broader impact – effectively treating newborns with severe jaundice – was still price. That new knowledge informed our future project strategy at D-Rev.

Bernie Roth, the Academic Director of Stanford’s d.school and the Yoda for design wisdom, reminds us to “Watch our language”[2]. It influences how we see things – and ultimately how we act. Calling a learning a failure will discourage honesty and integrity – and hinder the pursuit of impact. And this is the last thing we all want.

For entrepreneurs – and donors – who are focused on impact, there is no failure – there is only learning. We use these lessons to iterate, make a good product great – to create impact. If we as a sector want to achieve meaningful impact and solve big problems, then the first step is calling learning what it is, encourage it and incentivize it. And yes, we suggested another title for the blurb about Comet.

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P.S. If you are looking for more information on design process, here are a few:

1. Stanford’s d.school aka the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design’s Collection of Methods
2. Bernie Roth’s new book: The Achievement Habit, which is based on his class at Stanford "Designer in Society" (I took it in 1998!). Bernie also talks about failure, but from a bit of a different angle. He calls  it a gift, and “part of the result if you have a bias to action”.
3. IDEO.org’s (free) Design Kit. (And check out the Case Studies - D-Rev’s Brilliance is one)