On your mark, get set, fail!

Failure. This was the first time we tried to search for how the Oxford Dictionary defined failure. The dictionary defines failure as – “to not be successful in achieving something.”

Searching for the antonym of failure resulted into an aha! moment while working on this article!

It is – “curious!”

I am sure, you, the reader, just like us, are flooded with many memories and examples of individuals (maybe more observed in toddlers) who have demonstrated curiosity. We were thinking these words. “Ah! So that’s what the absence of fear looks like!”

We did a little more asking around with our team before penning down this article. “Tell us what thoughts, sensations, emotions and feelings you have, whenever you have experienced failure.”

These are the sensations that were named: shivers; a clenching-like feeling in the belly; heavy breathing; gravity pull; heavy; baffled; itchy; warm; the tip of the ears get heated up.

And these are the thoughts that came up: unstoppable; mind chattering; this is happening because I am not good enough; oh my God, oh my God, oh my God; I knew this was going to happen.

And the following are the emotions and feelings that people shared: fear; burdened; anxiety; disappointment; remorse; guilt; unsettled; tensed; despair; restless; sad; mood-off.

How much of these are relatable for you?

When we at Kshamtalaya began our work as a Section-8, for purpose, not-for-profit organization working in Kotra block, Udaipur District, in 2016, our big audacious dream was to envision a geography where a system is not failing its people. There is that word again! And that vision drives us even today. It is to create a meaningful, relevant and compassionate education system that supports all students realize their potential.

We do this by creating spaces within schools as Centers of Excellence. We nurture these spaces through democratic learning, wellbeing, integrated life skills, and continuous dialogues on the values that drive our actions. We also create regional leaders through a fellowship model. We enhance our own theoretical knowledge about children and how they learn, through continuous capacity building of our team. WIPRO’s support and providing these opportunities to learn from the best has been remarkable and transformative for us.

For us at Kshamtalaya, we have consciously adopted a work culture that nurtures failures and uses it as an opportunity to learn. Therefore, failure for us (along with all the sensations we experience) have opened the doors of self-reflection.

We do this by asking ourselves questions such as the following. Have we thought of all the possible scenarios? Have we looked through multiple lenses? Are we missing something? What can we change about ourselves? What needs to change in the process? What steps must be added or deleted? What is the next right thing to do? All these questions, almost unequivocally, always lead to more questions.

Dear reader – What are some of the questions that you ask among your team, which help you look at failure through a curious lens?

We identify failure (and proudly so) by watching patterns in data. We have seen connotations in the data that have stood as evidence of what we experienced. It has thrown light on our efforts that need to be strengthened. We have also identified the onset of failures by listening keenly. The more we listen, the more we move toward reflection.

We will now move toward a more concrete explanation of our experiences. These will show how our failures have defined and helped us arrive at where we are today, or not arrive where we ought to be!

Failure in knowing the child

In one of our workshops for teachers, we read aloud “Ashok ki kahaani”. The story is part of a book named Deewar ka istemaal, authored by Krishna Kumar. It talks about an emergent reader Ashok, who in his early grades, memorizes the alphabet. However, he couldn’t read fluently. This eventually leads to irritation and then neglect from the teacher’s side. As a result, Ashok drops out of school.

While reading this, one of the teachers present in our Teacher Workshops said, “This story made me believe that there has been a huge gap in our understanding of students’ challenges. We only blame the parents. Or we consider that some children don’t want to learn or can’t learn.”

This incident threw light on teachers’ perspectives toward students. The teachers sometimes get entangled in logistical challenges. As a result, they struggle to invest in understanding where the child and their problems are coming from.

A more recent failure that we experienced at one of our geographies has had a powerful impact on us. It happened when we noticed some patterns in the data. Despite regular interventions in the classroom, we had not been able to help children achieve foundational learning levels. This was despite the work of a dedicated team of fellows of our organization.

These fellows had been learning, re-learning, and unlearning ways of being and their understanding of the child, day-in and dayout. In their interventions, lots of games, stories, music, and thematic lesson planning lit up the classrooms. However, we realized that there was something very fundamental that we had missed.

Our partners and mentors asked us a few reflective questions. Do we really know the child? What are our interventions working toward?

We immediately stopped and looked at ourselves through a critical lens. Then we structured our interventions to go deeper into each child’s learning trajectory. This was followed by the development of a curriculum that helps our fellows know more about the children’s lives, the conditions of their living and being.

This has had an impact. It even re-energized our fellows’ internal drives and motivation. Within three months, in the same geography, we have been able to bring down the number of students being at a beginner level of literacy from 24% to as low as 3%.

We also realized that we have been underestimating the children’s potential. This happened because of us looking at the narrative of learning outcomes through the FLN lens alone. Children are much more capable. It is time that we keep the ceiling higher. Programs such as Learning Festivals by our organization have continuously demonstrated this. Last year we have demonstrated over a thousand products that children have created in these spaces.

From an organizational point of view, it has been a major failure for us in not being able to build an inclusive environment for children with special needs. It has been a limitation specially in the rural, tribal region where there is a lack of resources to test students’ learning disabilities. Even when we identify children with special needs, we have not been able to address their needs professionally.

We are aware of the limitations around expertise in this area. We have asked ourselves what is it that we can do. We have been consistently present. We have also been making genuine efforts to create a compassionate and inclusive environment.

We have realized that no matter what is happening in our children’s lives, having one person who shows up every day, someone they can trust, and who tries to give an ear to their experiences, starts making a difference.

Failure in aligning the on-ground partners toward the vision

Intention (check!), planning (check!), mock planning (check!), reflection (check!)

Teachers’ turnout – 50%…

In our ongoing quest to align with a shared vision, we navigate a diverse landscape. Here each stakeholder, be it team members, government partners, or CSOs, holds distinct visions. All the stakeholders follow their own unique trajectories. Yet, collectively, each one aspires toward a common goal. This shared objective is to unlock each child’s potential. The overarching objective serves as a unifying force.

A tangible illustration of this unfolds in our teacher workshops. Here our focal point is to share the pivotal role of well-being in both the teacher’s life and its profound impact on students. Initially, we met with understandable reservations. However, as teachers gradually immerse themselves, they find gratification in the process.

Challenges arise when transitioning it into their teaching practices in the classroom setting. Systemic challenges act as a hurdle for effective implementation. This often does not reflect teachers’ intentions.

This issue persists during scaling efforts. Here intermediary layers may momentarily lose sight of the overarching purpose. Scaling often demands dedicated investment in processes. Structured processes guide ‘what to do’. However, effectively conveying the nuanced ‘how’ and ‘why’ remains a hardhitting failure.

Failing by relying solely on ‘individual brilliance’

Seven years ago, we were a small and growing team. Kshamtalaya was a group of individuals who were fueled immensely by passion. We were a team of five members from different geographies of our country. We all wanted to re-imagine education and learning experiences, where each child realizes her potential.

The organization has now grown into a team of 50. We have realized that passion does play an important role in the work. However, relying on it, or on individual brilliance alone, is essentially planning to fail.

Multiple times in the organization, we failed to meet our goals. Our lack of data hygiene in the beginning year, and our failure to achieve milestones, made us realize that structures and processes play a pivotal role in bringing order while we grow.

We now have governing policies on which we rely. These are our guides in building an organized form of working and being. Structures such as Logical Framework Analysis, rubrics, monthly, quarterly and annual reviews to hold each oher accountable, and data management systems, have helped us become better at data-driven decision making.

The failures in scale

Keeping the essence of what we are doing, the alignment of ‘why’ behind everything we do, how do we ensure it doesn’t dilute with time, especially while we scale? In our trajectory of growth, we have had to scale our programs from being delivered by five facilitators to 200+ facilitators. In such situations, there is always a risk one must keep weighing around how much of the essence of the vision and objectives of the programs can be replicated.

What role does leadership play here? It mustn’t be just left to training alone. Indicators, self-assessment metrices, and continuously learning from the people who are receiving these programs, are some of the checks and balances that helped us scale mindfully. We also have an innate belief that leadership should evidently focus on the inner transformation and mindset shifts. Thus, we must enable the process of learning rather than focus on the output alone.

The journey is the destination, the process is the outcome. Having this conviction and acting on it has unraveled huge takeaways for us. This has stood us in good stead while scaling our programs to the three states we now work in. Perhaps a brief discussion on two of our programs can throw some light on this. One of these is called ‘Learning Festivals’ and the other is a program designed for teachers’ well-being called Hausla – ‘Confidence/Courage’.

Both these programs stand on the value of focusing on the inner transformation of the program delivery person. They experience every part of the program, reflect, and build their own sense of belief and conviction. We have observed that these facilitators can now own the implementation of the program endto-end. The Learning Festivals have crossed the mark of 500 festivals over the last seven years. Hausla has reached up to two lakh teachers of Bihar, Rajasthan and Delhi.

Failing to proudly accept failure

Are we prepared and able to recognize and accept failure as an inevitable part of life? Are we giving ourselves the space to accept it as proudly as we do of success? We were surprised and in awe reading an article titled “A CV of Failures” written by Melanie Stefan.

We were particularly drawn to the discussion that it is in our general nature to keep our failures within us, locked away into a tiny little box with heavy locks. How about just sharing it? How about writing posts about it on social media handles? How about creating tools to measure failures so that more organizations can collaborate to address these? It will remind us of this very simple yet profound idea that we are not alone in this.

Our outro thoughts

Just like some songs have an outro, the following are our article’s outro thoughts. To quote from J. K. Rowling, “It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

We believe that most organizations working in India, especially in the education domain, will resonate with Rowling on this. In an organizational journey, failing is inevitable. In most cases, where there is a race to achieve outcomes at a particular pace and in a calculated time, failures are not encouraged enough.

However, in organizations where failure is nurtured as part of organizational culture, where it is considered as an opportunity to try out new things, it will inevitably bring in innovations. This also opens up the possibility to explore more and keep shifting gears.

Let us share an example of this from our own context. In one of our intervention schools, only four parents turned up for the celebration day of the Learning Festivals Program. This was despite our invitations extended to them through door-to-door visits.

Our team were highly critical to witness this. However, with the help of tools like six thinking hats and Root Cause Analysis, we dug deep to find out the reasons behind the low turnout. The ability in our leaders to look at failures compassionately allowed the fellows to process this achievement more around “what can I do better.”

Moving on, our fellows came up with an idea in the next season. They began to invite the parents by adding peela chawal or turmeric-coated rice on their doorsteps. This is the way in the community to invite people for weddings. And lo and behold! More than 40 parents turned out for an event at Government Primary School in Kotra. Our community members claimed, “You invited us with such respect. We simply couldn’t miss being there.”

Sure, failures help us learn. But just for a moment, let’s flip the coin. Maybe, one day the definition of what it means to fail itself might be different. Maybe our society will move toward a culture of acceptance of failures. Maybe the new list of thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations will look like this –

Thoughts: Oh! No, that didn’t work, is it? Oh, what else can I try next time? Feelings and emotions: Sad but also excited, reflective and optimistic.

Sensations: Tickling sensation in the stomach. And just like that, being a failure is to build resilience.

Maybe, one day, we’ll all form a new world order where failures are measured to help organizations recognize each other’s scope to grow and collaborate for deeper impact. Maybe we would start a trend #CuriousFailureDiaries and organizations would ask for collaborators to help them resolve that issue, or just simply ask for a space to feel heard!

Shall we begin hashtagging? Tell us your story of failure with a hashtag #CuriousFailureDiaries.