Failure to amplify is failure to empower: Lessons and strategies for addressing failures

Abstract Information: For five years (2015-2019), the Teaching of Evaluation TIG hosted annual Learning from Evaluation Failures sessions at AEA with presentations and facilitation by experienced evaluators. The pandemic ended those community of practice failure sessions filled with sharing, learning, laughter, and occasionally tears. This year’s theme offers an opportunity to harvest and highlight stories, songs, lessons, and strategies from those past sessions that may enlighten and inspire how to move forward from failure. New thinking about and approaches to failure will also be incorporated. Flawed facilitation aimed hopefully but inadequately at amplifying diverse voices can inadvertently lead to silencing those voices. Failure to amplify then becomes failure to empower. Evaluation can, and often does, evoke fear, anxiety, resistance, and avoidance. Calling a process “safe” doesn’t make it so for those invited into that space. Asserting that there is nothing to fear can heighten fear. Good intentions don’t ensure good results. Cluelessness manifests as naïveté exposed as insensitivity. There are failures of commission and failures of omission; failures of expecting too much and failures of expecting too little; and failures at the beginning, at the end, and throughout. Potential failures loom beneath every decision. In a world obsessed with success, failure becomes a nemesis. Perceptions of what constitutes failure vary: what one person views as failure, another views as success. Admonitions for dealing with failure abound: Fail fast! Fail often! Fail forward! This session will NOT fail to delve deeply into varied types of evaluation failures, their implications, how to avoid them and, when they do occur, how to learn from them.