Impact Failure Conclave 2022

The Centre for Public Policy (CPP) in collaboration with the SELCO Foundation, hosted the ‘Impact Failure Conclave 2022’ on 25th and 26th November 2022. The two-day event brought together stakeholders from the social development sector to engage in key learnings for improved impact. The mission of the conclave was to create an environment that encourages stakeholders to own their failures, learn and evolve. The event saw a series of panel discussions and workshops on the various ways organizations, philanthropists and other stakeholders can build a better relationship between failure and success.

The eminent speakers explained that societal change is a complex order with many moving parts and unique factors that could make or break an intervention – interventions designed to benefit those that exist on the margins of society and measured by social indicators like improved literacy, better healthcare and better nutrition. In this context, they said, there is a pressing need to periodically pause, reflect and understand how to constantly learn, ‘fail well’ or ‘fail-forward’. The conclave highlighted the fact that the gap in accepting and acknowledging failure is critical and a bridge necessary to achieve systemic, productive change. In order to enable such an environment, it is critical for stakeholders that influence the development ecosystem to come together and share successes and failures sincerely, and to proactively recognize failure and learning as a core part of organizational processes.