The Age of Failure

There's a lot of buzz in the social media community about Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody. (One sentence summary: collective action just got a lot easier.)

One line in his recent talk at the RSA particularly caught my attention:

"One of the things the internet does is it lowers the cost of failure, rather than the likelihood of failure. It enables us to fail more and learn more."

The 21st Century has been variously called the internet era, the computer age, the learning century, the information age, the innovation economy, even the new enlightenment. But I think this is the age of failure. It's when we learn to insulate ourselves from the consequences of failure sufficiently that the world becomes our playground.

And then, we can start breaking new ground, creating new ways of doing things, diversifying, experimenting, playing. Because we can fail as many times as we like in solving a problem, and we only need to get it right once.

So, if you want to change the world, make it easier for people to fail. Help us all to change the world badly. Because if we're all having a go, eventually some bright spark will crack it.

Ubuuntu

Not been a great deal of blogging happening in February, it's been a strange time for me. But someone sent me this quotation from Desmond Tutu today that I felt I should share with you, in these cold February days.

"In our country we talk of something called Ubuuntu. When I want to praise you, the highest praise that I can give you is to say, you have Ubuuntu - this person has what it takes to be a human being. This is a person who recognizes that he exists only because others exist: a person is a person through other persons. When we say you have ubuuntu, we mean you are gentle, you are compassionate, you are hospitable, you want to share, and you care about the welfare of others. This is because my humanity is caught up with your humanity."

Human beings are sociable creatures. We are conditioned for relationship, and our activities both require and nurture relationships with each other. We exist only because others exist, and the way we live our lives, design our institutions, run our governments and interact with our environment, should reflect this. We are defined as individuals within our social context, and the things we create should be too.

I can think of many people I know who have "ubuuntu". But I can think of few governments, few companies, few bureaucracies of which I could say the same. And that must change.