By Carson Christiano (CEGA)
DIL Enrichment Coordinator
The Development Impact Lab (DIL) is prepared for failure.
Most would agree that risk-taking is essential to innovation, whether we’re talking about creating a simple hand-washing station or
a state-of-the-art suspension bridge. At the same time, researchers from all disciplines – engineering and economics among
them – are prone to highlighting successes while downplaying ambiguous research results, misguided technologies, and projects
that fail to achieve their desired impact. We fear humiliation and the curtailment of donor interest. Yet open discussion about
what doesn’t work, in addition to what works, is critical to our eventual success as innovators. We at DIL, like so many others
working towards social change, believe strongly that there should be “no silent failures” in development.
In Silicon Valley, failure is regulated by the market. Venture capitalists don’t invest in technologies that consumers won’t buy.
In the social impact space, particularly in developing countries where consumer demand is difficult to quantify, donors and
governments rely on loose, assumption-laden predictions of return on investment. As millions of people in poor countries
around the world stand to benefit (and potentially lose) from large-scale social and
economic development programs, it follows that DIL and our partners maintain “Perhaps it’s not failure
a steadfast commitment to discussing failure – and to maintaining research
itself, but public failure,
transparency more broadly – as a moral imperative.
that we fear.”
Of course, it is infinitely easier to commit to the concept of research transparency
than to actually engage in it. Making a new technology or a program open source
requires extra complexity and bandwidth; prospectively registering a randomized trial takes precious time and resources, but
also holds us accountable for the results of our research, even if they do not turn out as we expect. How, then, can we change
behavior around research transparency, and encourage researchers to accept (and openly admit) failure as a necessary part of the
innovation process?
Perhaps it’s not failure itself, but public failure, that we fear. We weren’t pre-conditioned to be this way. In a 2010 TED Talk,
Tom Wujec revealed the results of a “Marshmallow Challenge” which he ran over 70 times with individuals of varying age and
occupation. In the challenge, teams of four were given 18 minutes to build the tallest freestanding structure they could out of 20
sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, and one marshmallow. Lo and behold, kindergart