I’ve been wrestling with the concept of failure this week and what exactly it means to fail. Seth Godin wrote about being in a dip. He noted that many successful ideas often faced a dip before being significantly successful. Of course, he also noted that a dip can sometimes be a cliff, and it’s extremely helpful to be able to distinguish between the two! (Note: to state the obvious, you should keep going in a dip, and run away from a cliff….)

Attitudes to failure vary by country. In Europe, financial failure, failure in business, or in career is frowned upon.  It is seen as a stigma. Bankruptcy is close to the last possible thing that anyone would choose. And so this fear of failure, this concern that our communities and our peers will look down upon us because we failed, leads to a failure to be willing to step out in pursuit of something greater. It’s one of the greatest parts of the “American Dream”, this willingness to accept that failure is not the end, but merely a stumble along the journey.

Social enterprise can be the same as regular angel investing. (An angel investor is an individual, or collection of individuals in a fund that generally provides the next stage of funding for a start-up after you’ve tapped up your own bank manager on a personal overdraft and borrowed what you can from your kind, ever-believing parents…) Interestingly, the average angel investor in the US invests in just 1 in 7 of the proposals that he or she looks at. And of the ones that are invested in, 1 in 10 makes 90% of the returns. So basically they get it right 1 time in 70!

I’d argue that there is very little reason as to why our ability to determine which social enterprise will work, is any better. Some will be effective, some will flop and some will change the world (see Grameen Bank & the large scale launch of microfinance for example). So here’s where I’m going with this – if we, as a community of people who desire to bring change to the world so that it is a better place, we who want to see “social justice”, we who want to throw ourselves into something meaningful and create something that impacts, we need to speculate. We need to be willing to start 70 ventures, and expect that 69 of them will not work. We need to be willing to financially back a wide range of these people and ventures, and get as many things going as possible.

And we, as the social entrepreneurs, need to be willing to fail. There’s a lot of peer pressure in this field too – who wants to be the entrepreneur who set out to change the world and got nowhere? But if we can’t face up to the likely reality that we will fail more times than we succeed, then we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. There are too many mediocre projects and ideas that drain funding (this is true in my own context anyway) that actually should be stopped, freeing up the funding and time to propel other initiatives forward.

I met someone back in October who needs funding for her social enterprise.  She has this amazing product that will really tackle head-on the water crisis in the developing world and has massive potential. And yet the funding just never seems to appear for her, despite positive reviews, awards, and all of the right connections and numbers. It seems wrong that we persist with things that fail, when projects that could be doing good are stuck.

What are you working on right now that you need to quit? Anything you need to take a long hard look at and say that it’s not the best thing to keep going with? Good luck with that decision, I’m finding it’s not that easy!