Failing Forward: How CARE is Focusing on What Goes Wrong to Improve Impact

CARE's Failing Forward initiative is sparking opportunities to showcase the ideas that don't work so we can spend more time implementing the ones that do. It's changing the conversation inside the organization, and leading to changes in the way we design and implement programs. It's also allowing us to make connections across a global portfolio of more than 900 projects, and with new and different partners to learn from their experience.

Failing Forward combines a number of light-touch approaches, like podcasts, coffee conversations, social media posts, and slight changes to meeting agendas. It also builds on the power of networks and collaboration to spark new ideas and conversations, and to showcase problems that we know we need to tackle differently. The project works with buy-in from high-level leaders, but more importantly, draws on the deep experience of implementing staff to talk to their peers about what they tried, and how they would do it differently.