Shift. Reset. Repeat.

The plenary session this morning at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (#13NTC) was all about failure – how you define it, what to learn from it, why it’s important, and the critical need for the nonprofit/social good/philanthropy community to do a better job embracing it.  I was privileged to sit on stage with Allyson Burns from the Case Foundation (@allieb37), Erin Shy from Sage Nonprofit (@ErinShy), Megan Kashner from Benevolent (@BenevolentNet)… and our host, moderator and fearless leader, Beth Kanter (@kanter)… and help to focus and drive the conversation.

I think everyone – on stage and in the audience – agrees that a) failing is an inevitable part of the important work required to change the world and address critical issues that challenge our society, b) that it is far more productive to look for ways to learn and adapt when things fall apart then it is to dwell on mistakes or cast blame, and c) that making the most of failing gets easier the more you do it and the more support you have in the process.  That’s a pretty big deal if you think about it – that a seemingly difficult, potentially uncomfortable conversation about people and organizations involved in the nonprofit/social change/philanthropy space needing to fail more, fail smarter, and fail better was not met with any obvious disagreement or anger.

But let me be clear: having consensus on the need to fail more, fail smarter, and fail better won’t do anything to change how we think, how we act, or the work we are doing to address serious issues that are challenging our society.  In fact, having agreement on those core points is probably a bad thing.  We will get lazy.  We will assume that our acknowledgement of the fruits of failure will organically result in a noticeably different way of operating. 

It won’t. 

Thinking about, talking about, understanding, even appreciating the value of failure won’t change anything.  We have to push beyond failing as some sort of amusing intellectual discussion and start to do things differently.  We need to force failure.

In my closing comment at the plenary I issued a simple challenge: start failing. Just do it. Just fucking do it.

You can fail big. You can fail small.  You can fail a lot. You can fail a little.  The key is to start failing.  And to keep failing – over and over and over again.  To fail all the time.  To force yourself, your organization, the people you work with, the community of people and groups working to address an issue or cause to fail.  To fail more. To fail smarter. To fail better.

I am challenging you to fail.  And if you aren’t willing – if you aren’t committed – then I want you to get out of the business. Do something else. Work on something different. The issues that we need to address are real.  The big challenges that are facing our society are serious and only growing and become more complex.  We need to be faster, smarter and better if we are going to succeed – and to do that we need to understand the role that failing plays in our work, and use our failing to do something amazing.

I also give you permission to fail.  It won’t be easy.  It can get messy.  Even the people who very confident in their ability to turn failing into awesomeness will tell you how failing can be exhausting and punishing.  But failing is important – necessary in fact – and we are long overdue in the nonprofit/social change/philanthropy community to start getting better at failing.  So, if you need a note from me to pass along to your boss or your board or your funder, I will write one for you.  If you need a pep talk when things get difficult and confusing, I will provide one.  If you need a tutorial on how to really make a mess of things, and come out stronger on the other side, I have plenty of personal and professional experiences to form a curriculum with.  But if you refuse to start failing, and really force things to happen, or you don’t take this challenge seriously, I want you to step aside.  I want you to find a different line of work.  If you aren’t going to enthusiastically use your ticket on the failure train, I want you to give your seat to someone else who is willing to step up and start to make things happen.

I fail all the time. I know it.  And I feel pretty confident in my ability to learn and adapt when I fail.  But I am just one person.  The benefits of my failing are limited – unless I fail in ways that others can benefit from.  I can do more to help others understand my mistakes, and what I learned from them.  We all can.  And when we do, it allows everyone else to focus their energy failing on different things.  To make new mistakes.  To get smarter. 

I challenge you.  I implore you.  I beg of you.  Start failing. Fail on your own.  Fail with others.  Fail in ways that we all will learn and benefit from. Do something. Anything. Just fucking do it.  And don’t look back.

Life is beginning to return to 'normal' here in New York City.  I realize that is somewhat easier for me to say given that I live on the Upper West Side (vs. downtown for example).  We never lost power, cable or internet access. Damage in our neighborhood was limited to a few downed trees and the like.  The subway is still closed and my office downtown in inaccessible - both of which are a hassle, but certainly not a tragedy. Overall, the disruption to our school, work and similar schedules is the biggest challenge we have had to address.  I feel very fortunate indeed.

Like many others, I have been tracking Super Storm Sandy closely over the past few days, especially by consuming as much media -- traditional and social, real and fake - as I could find.  My interest in disasters is fueled, at least in part, by my curiosity around how our society plans for, deals with, and responds to disasters.  As a part of my work, I think a lot about how technology and the internet impact the ways we get/share information -- and especially what happens during crisis.  If anything, my personal connection to this event offered an additional lens through which to analyze everything that has happened.

One thing you realize quickly when you monitor disasters, humanitarian and otherwise, is that the media response to these events varies significantly.  Super Storm Sandy was one of the largest storms ever to hit the United States, so it likely would have received significant coverage regardless.  But, the fact that the storm hit, among other places, New York City - the center of the media universe - guaranteed that coverage was, and will continue to be, more extensive than other similar events.

It begs the question... while every humanitarian crisis/disaster inflicts enormous pain and suffering, why doesn't the media doesn’t give them similar attention?  And what impact does that have on how we understand, appreciate, prepare and respond when these events unfold?  What would be different about how we prepare for, deal with, and recover/rebuild after a crisis if our media coverage was different?

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Almost two years ago, on February 28, 2011, I moderated an event sponsored by CauseShift and Oxfam International.  We gathered leaders from the humanitarian aid sector together with innovators inside and outside the sector for a special two-hour event/discussion about the media's role during crisis. We challenged those who gathered to create new ways for humanitarian agencies and the media to keep people engaged in real-time and over the longer-term.

The event featured series of one-on-one interviews.  After this 'conversation gauntlet' set the tone for the discussion, participants broke into teams and brainstormed solutions based on the following questions:

How do you explain a disaster in real-time?

How do you create a marketplace to more efficiently identify needs and match them with resources?

How do you keep 1 million people interested one year later?

What do we need to STOP doing during disasters?

Below you will find videos/transcripts of the interviews I conducted during the event, as well as notes/details from the solutions session.

Moderator Preparation: Research Links

Conversation Gauntlet transcripts and videos: Ayesha Khanna, Hybrid Reality Institute Kathleen Hessert, Exercise 24 Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Stephen Cassidy, UNICEF The Conversation Gauntlet (videos only)

Breakout Team Ideas: Answers to the Four Main Questions

(You can find more information here: http://rallythecause.com/2011/03/23/feb-28-crisis-and-media-event-the-outcomes-library/).

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These conversations should be outdated -- two years is an eternity in today's fast-moving, constantly changing, rapidly evolving, 24-second-news-cycle driven world.  But as you read through the notes, you probably get the feeling, as I did, that not much (or at least not enough) has changed over that time.  I am confident we are getting smarter and adapting our behaviors in preparation for the next major event.  But I also think we can learn a lot more, and more quickly, and move more quickly to update our systems and approaches to dealing with these events.

I have lots of thoughts about the Kony 2012 campaign from Invisible Children - what was smart (a lot), what was not as smart (a lot) and what it all means.  Let me start with this:

Jason Russell, who narrated the Kony 2012 video in addition to directing it, told Reuters on Friday that he didn’t expect the incredibly detailed story of Joseph Kony and child militias in Africa to be answered in a mere 30 minutes.  The article quotes Russell as follows:

It definitely oversimplifies the issue. This video is not the answer, it’s just the gateway into the conversation. And we made it quick and oversimplified on purpose… We are proud that it is simple. We like that. And we want you to keep investigating, we want you to read the history.

My view: the campaign concept and the video are not where the team at Invisible Children missed the mark -- it was the follow-through that should have been done better/differently. 

If you assume that the audience will be motivated to learn more about this issue, then you have to help them access and make sense of the necessary information.  Invisible Children failed at that important task.  While there is information online about Joseph Kony, and more news coverage and blog-driven analysis of the issue being published each day, Invisible Children missed the opportunity to guide and shape the conversation beyond the most basic introductory level. 

Invisible Children should have created and promoted more information and insight about Joseph Kony to accompany the video -- think a directors cut version that explored the background and characters that were featured.  In addition, Invisible Children should have curated articles, books, interviews and other information from credible voices on this issue to help bolster their argument and provide important context to their audience. 

The execution of the campaign and video were smart - and clearly resonated.  By failing to more deeply engage on an intellectual level, however, that audience that saw the video, Invisible Children has missed the biggest opportunity of all - to keep the audience engaged, to get them more connected to the issues, and to build an army of supporters that they could mobilize to further promote their work and help fulfill their mission.

I will be hosting a podcast at SXSW today that looks at some of the big themes trends and topics that everyone will be discussing all week in Austin – or should be discussing -- and how those ideas can be used to change business, media, and maybe even the world.

I have three very smart people joining me for this conversation:

Melinda Wittstock, the Founder and CEO of NewsiT

Gemma Craven, the head of the NY team for Social@Ogilvy

Jack Madans, Project Manager at CodeForAmerica

Here is my setup/intro:

Technology and the Internet are driving significant changes to our society, and these changes are being felt by everyone. The ways people get/share information are changing - rapidly and constantly. The result is that the ways we conceive of, create, distribute, consume and share media (all forms, but especially online) are very different than just a few years ago.  This provides us with wonderful opportunities to transform and innovate how we do everything - conduct business, promote media, organize communities, and drive change.  And yet, it is obvious that we need to work collectively, and in decisively new ways, if we want to see real changes. We must broaden the scope of our concerns beyond the isolated needs of a single organization, market, or sector and instead address these challenges on a global level.

ChangeThis has published my 'Shift & Reset Manifesto.' Read it now.

Here is the summary:

“I am angry. There are real problems facing the world, and we, as a society, are not doing enough to address them in the right ways, not the ways we know are possible. The old way isn’t working, and we know it.

We continue to reward the same behaviors we have rewarded in the past while expecting different results. We profess interest in really doing things differently but settle into routines that are comfortable and safe, and we are fooling ourselves. There are lots of excuses for not making real, demonstrable changes in the way we live, work, and how we interact as individuals and engage in groups/communities. I have heard them all. I have used many of them myself. But they are bullshit. All excuses are. A person either truly, deeply, genuinely cares about changing things or he doesn’t. You can step up and do what it takes, in whatever way you can, or you need to acknowledge your limits and accept the results.

What might be possible if we were really committed, as individuals and as a society? I’ve thought a lot about this, and instead of remaining angry, I choose to embrace the question and figure out how I can use the anger to make things happen.”

Holy crap!

The (London) Daily Telegraph is reporting that BP will announce this week, in a report to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, that "in the 18 weeks since the fatal explosion and subsequent spill, the oil giant has spent at least $1m a week on network television, cable and radio advertising."

Here is a link to the full article.

Unless I missed something, the ads promote BP's commitment to addressing the crisis caused by the oil spill in the gulf.  I don't have a problem with BP running advertising -- or that the focus of their ads is to promote their commitment to the gulf.  People should know that BP is committed to cleaning up the mess they created.  But if/when that advertising sends a message that is not consistent with the actions the company is taking, that's when the problem arises.

Two thoughts:

1) I wrote a two-part column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently (Part I, Part II) about how we need to re-think the way we address serious issues, and respond when something like an oil spill occurs.  Seems to me that spending millions of dollars on advertising proves my point... BP, like everyone else, is using an old playbook and needs to find a new approach.

2) What a missed opportunity!  Spending millions of dollars on advertising to spin a story for people, especially when the public (who is paying attention) likely already knows, or assumes, that BP is committed to the cleanup, is a waste.  BP could/should have used the advertising to change the conversation, to solicit better ideas, to recruit support and assistance from people beyond their network.  Media has unprecedented reach, and influence, in our society.  It would have been exciting to see BP recognize that and use the media they created, and paid to promote, to explore what might have been possible.

For all the progress that the music and television industries have made in the last several years, the ways they approach digital content still need to change -- and in a big way.  Case in point, last night's Emmy Awards broadcast.  As this article from PaidContent.org suggests, NBC can't/won't promote some of the best elements of last show because of issues related to music rights:

Another odd chapter in NBC’s mixed viral video history: it can’t post two of the clips that have the best chance of catching on from the 2010 Emmys. Host Jimmy Fallon knocked it out of the park with an energetic Glee-esque opener to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, a mixed pre-taped and live-action number featuring Jane Lynch, Glee kids, Jon Hamm, Tina Fey, and a cameo by Tim Gunn that quickly got social media buzz. The clip should have been online before the next commercial break for NBC to take advantage of that buzz—and to take ownership before others started passing it around.

Another number paying tribute to the end of 24, Law & Order and Lost, part of it with Fallon channeling Elton John, seemed destined to catch on, at least with fans of those shows. But @NBCLA tweeted back when I mentioned that the videos has yet to post: “Wish we could, but we have restrictions on what we can post online.” A spokeswoman later suggested by e-mail that music rights are the issue.

Instead, as is its practice with hot NBC video, Mediaite quickly put the Gleevideo up, and grainy versions started to pop up on YouTube.

Now, I understand there are some complex issues at play here, most notably what's legal and who gets paid.  But as a member of the audience I want to make sure the television and music industry people recognize that I don't understand those issues, nor do I particularly care how they get resolved.  You see, I don't consider it my job to figure out how to make the television and music industry money.  For my part, when I I tune into the broadcast of something like the Emmy Awards and see something I think is funny, or really creative, I want to share it with my network/friends.

If I blog or tweet something about the Emmy Awards, that helps NBC.  If I share a video of Jimmy Fallon singing, it helps the musician that he channeled (in this case Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Boyz to Men, and Green Day).  The easier that NBC, the musicians, their labels, and everyone else make it for me to share those clips... and maybe consider buying a song, or a related piece of merchandise, the more likely I am to pull the trigger. 

Words on the wall at the Gannett headquarters in McLean, VA (where I was participating in the WeMedia Tabula Rasa DC event today).