The cemetery of failures [title to change]

I recently read an article on The New Yorker about a memoir titled “Do No Harm” written by Henry Marsh, a distinguished neurosurgeon in the UK. In his book, Marsh wrote about all of the worst mistakes that he committed in the operating theater in the decades of his medical career. As I read the article, I could not help but think about some of the individuals in Kudoz that I had the privilege to work with, their families, their staff workers, and their care givers. The article arose in me the feelings of regrets and shame of some of the things that I have done and said to the people we worked with, and how I wish we could have done things differently. Both Marsh’s work and ours have overlapping similarities, broadly speaking, in the way that they both are attempts of diagnosing, treating and rehabilitating an unfavorable condition towards a good outcome. For Marsh, that’s the human nervous system. For us, the context is in the adult education in the disability space in British Columbia.

What this blog post tries to do is to extract some lessons learned and to avoid reinventing the wheel. This blog post also contains some of my personal reflection on how these mistakes have changed me as a person. Because when it comes to learning from mistakes, it’s not as simple as giving out the guidance and rules to others about what to do and what not to do in the future. What is deeper and more critical than that is to extract the values that come out of those mistakes. To really understand what matters in this work. Yes, guidance and rules are important to not repeat the same things we have tried. But to understand the values of what we are creating means to understand the why behind the actions. More than guidance and rules, I hope to be able to share these values to my team and others out there who are trying to change the landscape of our social services.

It is impossible to avoid making mistakes in our work. On the contrary, mistakes take almost the main stage in a prototyping project like Kudoz. Only in a prototyping project, failures are encouraged because failures and mistakes produce the knowledge that we need to build the foundations of the end product of the solution. When it was born a year ago out of an immersive, on-the-ground research project in Burnaby, it was only a concept, a big idea. Back then, we were clueless of how it would look like. To prototype means to try out and to make mistakes and to fail. As we make mistakes, we are able to shape what the concept would look like and how we implement it in real life, all the way to the details of the interactions.

Because we believe that programs do not prompt behaviors change, but interactions do, interactions that shift attitudes and behaviors of the user groups. Because interactions fill the gaps between the ideation and implementation of a solution. This is what we call the mechanism of change. And in InWithForward, we identify 7 Mechanisms of Change. You can learn more about these 7 Mechanisms of Change here. I can go on forever to talk about what mistakes we made in the past 9 months when we were prototyping Kudoz.