Glory of failure

The Glory of Failure Campaign was originally an RSA Networks philanthropic project created by Mitchell Sava in 2007. It is now co-chaired by Jonathan Jewell.

RSA Networks is part of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA).

The goal of 'The Glory of Failure' is to change society's attitude to failure, encouraging a more healthy approach to risk taking and removing the taboo around failure. It seeks to heighten individuals, organisational and society receptivity to failure and develop the intellectual and emotional sophistication to help people to make the most of failure when it does occur. Indeed, what separates this work from concurrent approaches within risk management to containment and mitigation of failure when it occurs and contingency planning and action in relation to it, is the distinctive niche of the campaign.

'The Glory of Failure' as a title has been used by New Statesman and other journalists since at least 2002. The Title is intended to promote dissonance in its audience, juxtaposing 'glory' with 'failure' as disparate concepts at least in UK culture. As a provocative title, it is the working name of the principally of the culture and society theme's media campaign, one of four key themes recognised by the campaign in its current incarnation. In practice, this title has been used to refer to the overall work of the campaign, and is the name the campaign website 1.

The initial idea behind the project came from observation of the differences in culture between the UK and the US in respect of attitudes to entrepreneurship. This quickly expanded to cover societal, educational, organisational and individual experiences of failure. Drafts of the principles and dimensions of failure developed collectively by the team were tested at a transdisciplinary colloquium held in September 2009 in London and the campaign then divided into the four work streams.

In this context, transdisciplinary refers to the '[...] across disciplines' of the overarching principles and dimensions of failure developed in the work and these include creative writing, parenting, infrastructure projects, healthcare, psychology and individual life events (ILE), third sector, amongst others.

The current themes being considered are failure in the context of organisations, education, individual failures/adverse life events, and a media campaign AbOUT getting high profile speakers to talk about their experiences of failure. The media campaign retains the original title of 'The Glory of Failure' while the University organises the other activities associated with the project.

A first book ('The Failure Files') based on the content of the first Colloquium is currently under development to be published late 2010.

The second Colloquium and hard launch is expected to be at the RSA in September 2010.

Planning is already taking place for Volume 2 of 'The Failure Files' alongside a collection of other publications including 'The Big Book of Failure' (looking at the work of the campaign GeneRally and examining the phenomenon of 'crucible moments' from a range of perspectives told through case studies), a 'Manual of Failure Laboratories' for schools, colleges and universities and a collection of tools for organisations to help build failure tolerance. A parallel blog site develops the work between publications and performs a central public relations/marketing interface with the public.

The organising structure behind these work streams is the 'University of Failure' which serves as a vehicle for research, theory into practice, education and training around failure and is home to the repository 'The Library of Failure', supported by a del.icio.us group account accessible to the general public.

The idea of campuses of the University has spurred development of work on a fifth work stream around international differences in culture.