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"Ashley Good from Toronto, Canada is recognized as no less than "a world expert on failure". Working on several development projects around the world she was faced with the need to address the inefficiencies, and sometimes ineffectiveness of development work. Based on her experience she created AdmittingFailure.com and FailForward.org in 2010 to spark a shift in how civil society perceives and talks about failure. In her opening keynote titled "What's So Great About Failure?" at FailCon Oslo June 6, 2013 she shares her story and some ideas for the audience to apply the Fail Forward approach to their contexts."

KIN has long stressed the importance of learning from failure. In this short, funny and revealing post, David D'Souza publicly shares his experience of what not to do in a TV interview. His post uses humour, it's punchy (note the bullet points) and is in the first-person. I doubt I'll ever be on TV, but everyone could immediately relate to and learn from this. Now that's real learning from failure - the antithesis of a dry 'lessons learned' report.

"Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can't make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can't determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case. We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitatio

Learning from failure stories

"Failure happens. This is a community and a resource to encourage new levels of transparency, collaboration and innovation across the for-purpose sector."

"David Damberger discusses "Learning From Failure" at TEDxYYC 2011. David is the founder of Engineers Without Borders Calgary (EWB). After building the organization in Calgary and working with them in India, David spent four years building EWB's overseas programs as the Director of Southern African Programs. In this role, David consulted for dozens of African based companies, non-profits and governments in the fields of agriculture; food processing; water and sanitation; and mobile applications for development."

KIN Winter workshop is on "Learning from Failure". Great FT.com article

An alternative process for learning from failure

Inspiring TED Talk on giving kids the opportunity to learn from failure. Just substitute 'work colleagues' for 'children'

Nowadays organizations have realized the importance of knowledge and knowledge management.  The organizations know that machines, equipments, and building cannot count as the most important properties of the organization. It is clear that the most important property of every organization is organizational knowledge and correct management of it will cause core competencies for the organization and also victory against the competitors. Of course knowledge and knowledge management both are important for an organization, but are all knowledge management efforts in the organizations successful? If knowledge management efforts fail in an organization, what are the main failure factors of this phenomenon? This paper attempts to answer this question by analyzing a failed case study in implementing a knowledge management system .

During this innovative event, World Bank explores an internal report about 'How the Bank learns' allowing the audience to vote in real time on the top topics they want to explore using 'Poll everywhere'. We will be using this tool at the Autumn workshop.The Bank shares some thought provoking ideas on 'fast and slow thinking' and where individuals look for knowledge (video -12.15-15.15) as well as allowing participants to vote on a number of provocative statements on a five point scale, to decide choose five topics for discussion with the panel e.g. 'Drink more coffee', 'Learning from failure' and 'Taking time to reflect' (Poll results 27.30 - 30.30). Culminating in the panel discussion on the chosen topic areas including 'live questions' as the discussion develops (Panel discussion 30.30 - 1:14:00).The session is wrapped up with a final vote on the whole event (1:21:00)

Interesting read, but misses the 2 key factors: Lack of 'embedding knowledge sharing in the day to day business process instead of separate from it and the 'KM' title itself . If you have to explain it to a manager or engineer etc, you have a problem.