Fail better

In Chichester last night for an open space event with South East Region committee members, Fellows and guests. It was great to see so many people taking time out on a Monday evening to discuss how the RSA could make a greater impact and be a stronger network. The evening came up with some good ideas and a real desire to grow RSA networks and activities.

I emphasised two points in my opening comments. The first was that while we need to get continual feedback from Fellows as we take forward our ambitions for Fellowship, we need to give as much time to the change we want to achieve in the world outside as to the changes we need internally. There has been lots of debate in the OpenRSA facebook group and our RSA Networks platform about the change process, and we are learning some valuable lessons, many of which will soon be seen in a series of adaptations leading up to a re-launch of RSA Networks platform. But I sense that Fellows are now impatient to focus more on the real world projects that might emerge from our new forms of engagement.

This takes me to my second point. If we are to turn more outwards we need to make sure that the ideas we have are robust and add value to what is out there already. A networking approach, whether delivered online through the Networks platform, or locally in events and emerging relationships like those being fostered in the South East and North West, offers a fast track to testing and developing ideas.

Being an RSA Fellow offers an invaluable opportunity to test out an idea with a group of well-connected, intelligent and diversely talented colleagues. These ideas can come from many different sources. Just today I have been asked to join RSA Network discussions about education reform (instigated by the authors of a fascinating letter in the Journal) and the growing debate about failure (again building on a Journal article). When our new all-singing-all-dancing website goes live soon, it will provide lots of new sources for ideas and debate. For example, our videos of RSA lectures will offer links through to discussion forums about the lecture and from that, possibly, to network initiatives seeking to turn ideas in actions. 

The ideas that past muster will then have access to insight, support and participation from Fellows as well as various forms of support from RSA HQ (and our soon-to-be-appointed field work team). But, speaking as someone who has a new idea every week and a good one roughly every three months, it is just as valuable to find out quickly that one’s idea doesn’t quite make the grade. There is nothing worse than putting lots of time and commitment into a brainwave only to find out it has a fatal flaw, that someone is doing it already, or that no one shares your enthusiasm.

When ideas are floated in the RSA Fellowship (whether on or off-line, whether in national local forums) they should get feedback not just from Fellows but from other people and organisations we invite because they have expertise and experience in the area under discussion. A strength of the RSA brand is that busy important people usually respond with enthusiasm to requests from us to offer advice. This way we avoid re-inventing the wheel or, worse, re-inventing the Sinclair C5.   

If one in thirty of the ideas floated in emerging Fellowship networks - whether on-line or in off-line sessions like Chichester last night - gets through to the stage of becoming a developed proposal it will be a good hit rate.  As Mitchell Sava points out in the Journal, failure can be as creative as success. 

Getting these new ways of working right is about resources, systems, participation but also vitally about culture. We need working methods and norms that encapsulate the right combination of challenge and support. RSA Fellows should be seen as the kind of people who have commitment and ideas but also the kind who thrive on constructive criticism.