Embracing the Fail
Last week I failed. I organised an event for one of the communities I run and no-one turned up. Okay, not literally “no-one”, but those hardy folk who made it must have felt like they were intruding on my private grief - especially since we had tried so hard. To plagiarise Churchill, never in the field of community had so much effort been expended by so many for so few.
So, did I wail and gnash my teeth (whatever that is)? Obviously. But do I regret trying it? Not a bit. I know my community members pretty well. Many have care duties and don’t live in London, so I was careful to canvass opinion and was assured by a goodly number that they would find a way to get there. However, when it came to the crunch, they didn’t. Maybe it was the weather, maybe life just got in the way. So, should I airily put it down to bad timing and luck and try again? I don’t think so. The stark take-away was that for too many members, the event fell firmly into the “nice to attend” rather than “must attend” category. And redesigning it to migrate from the first category to the second would be difficult and maybe impossible. Rather than let optimism triumph over experience and hope that if I keep going attendance will gradually grow, I’d rather put all my effort into serving as much of the community as possible in the way that suits them.
When building a community, failure can be a blessing in disguise, albeit (Churchill again) the disguise may sometimes be pretty convincing. Why? Because we usually don’t learn a lot from success. It makes us happy, of course, and we usually feel quite clever for a while, but we think longer and harder about our failures, so we come to understand the underlying causes better. This particular failure showed me quickly and clearly that something was not right for that particular group of people. It might be perfect for another group, but not this one and that is more than fine. So, my mantra going forward is to embrace the fail. Take stock, iterate, try something else.
Have you ever failed at something you have tried with your community? Let’s take the shame and pain out of failure together – why not share your experience too? I’m sure we can all learn from each other.
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