Learning How To Fail

One of the most important aspects of being a successful entrepreneur is learning how to fail. Whether it's a messed up grant proposal, shifting team dynamics, or dealing with different stakeholder expectations, perhaps the most vital skill of a successful entrepreneur is adaptation. Today in San Francisco, the SNAP Summit is convening to ask how leading tech entrepreneurs have failed, and then put the lessons they learned back into practice.

The tech industry is an interesting one to learn from. In many ways, it's more structured to deal with failure than any other field. Venture capital expects that most of it's investments just simply won't pan out. Founders who have a failure or two under their belt often times have a much better ability to get people to support them, because the learning from failure is respected.

Of course, the stakes of failure are somewhat lower in the web 2.0 world then they can be in the international development space. When an organization begins to create an expectation of a certain resource, and people start to plan their work and world's around that resource, the results of failure can be extremely damaging.

Still, it will be interesting to see what lessons from a "pro-failure" industry like the internet can be applied to the social enterprise space. I'm still in Maine post Pop!Tech, but we'll have a guest post later from one of my team at Assetmap, who has herself lots of experience with human rights and social justice issues. Stay tuned.

Photo: Twitter's famous "Fail Whale" - displayed whenever the site goes down.