Maybe It Wasn't the Whole Thing

On revisiting your failures, and why it's okay to repeat them

There's a particular paralysis that sets in after you've tried something new and it hasn't worked. It isn't despair—it's caution gone afoul of wisdom. You start a sentence with "We could try—" then hear the ghost of the last thing you tried, and finish with "—never mind. We did something like that before."

I've been at this long enough to have a decent-sized graveyard of good ideas. Walking through it lately, I've noticed something uncomfortable: most of these things didn't totally fail. Part of each of them failed. But we buried the whole body.

The Stickers

Several years ago, our non-profit had a nice little public awareness campaign where we put beautiful gift stickers inside the donated adult books we couldn't use for our children, and left them in coffee shops and waiting rooms around town. People found them, and told us so—that little jolt of being left something special by a stranger with no strings attached.

But we had no way to count any of it. This was before QR codes were everywhere; the tracking problem we couldn't solve then now takes an afternoon. And it lived entirely with one employee who loved it. They moved on to a great role at a bigger organization, which is what should happen to good people, and it went with them.

Sometime recently, someone found what was left of the stickers in a supply closet and started putting them out on our info table near the front door—not because they knew what the project was, but because they were pretty. Designed by a terrific local creative firm via donation, they are very pretty. But they are clearly meant to be gift book plates, not random swag give aways for the public.

That's what survives when a thing has no owner and no record: the artifact, stripped of its intent. Still lovely, doing nothing. We didn't chose to end that project. I let it evaporate, and called that a verdict.

The Grants

Last year we hired a second grantwriter. Their work was impeccable. Between the two writers we submitted 64 applications, more than double what we'd ever done.

Fifteen came in.

I was still deciding how to feel about that when my finance chair pointed out what I hadn't seen: every one of the fifteen was a renewal. Not a single new foundation or corporate philanthropy prospect landed.

The obvious conclusion is the discouraging one—stop chasing new grants. But that blames the new grants, and they aren't what broke. What broke is that we sent excellent paper to strangers. Our renewals came in because those funders already knew us—had visited, met the team, watched us deliver. The proposal wasn't doing the work. The relationship was, and the proposal was merely documenting it.

So the variable that failed wasn't "new." It was "cold." This year I want fewer cold applications, not fewer new ones—half the volume, twice the groundwork. That isn't abandoning the experiment. That's re-running it with better controls.

The Rebrand

Ten years ago I reorganized our five programs into three buckets built around the sectors we partner through: healthcare, education, community. RX, ED, GO. New logos, t-shirts, restructured financials, a website rebuilt around the three.

It worked for funders. It didn't work for anyone else. Staff kept using the old program names, and so did our partners and the community. Eventually we gave the new ones up, at least in our external communications.

Now we have three new pillars—Book Access, Family Reading Network, and Publishing—and I've been asking myself, a little anxiously: am I walking into the same trap? Isn't branding what other people think of you, not what you say about yourself?

Yes. It is. I don't think you get around that.

But I misdiagnosed my own experiment for ten years. RX/ED/GO didn't fail—it went underground. It stayed in our financial ledgers as classes until just now, quietly letting us pull out whichever slice of our work matched a given funder's interests and focus areas, the entire time I was privately filing it under things that didn't take. What failed was the second job I gave it: being the name our community used for the thing they loved. One structure, two audiences, and only one was ever going to be moved by cute new label.

What the Graveyard Is For

A good idea with no owner looks identical to a bad idea. So does a good idea run without its key ingredient, one aimed at the wrong audience, and one quietly working in the background while you weren't looking. All four produce the same flat feeling, and we file all four under the same heading and stop.

So the honest question isn't did this fail. It's what part failed, and was that part actually the idea?

Which makes it reasonable, maybe even necessary, to repeat a failure. Not identically—with one variable moved. The stickers, with a QR code and a named owner. The new-prospect grants, warm. The pillars, but only where pillars belong: at the strategic level. That's not stubbornness. It's the second run of an experiment you botched the first time.

We treat dead initiatives like people who've left, as if they can't ever come back, as though the ending was the whole story. But ending isn't the same as being wrong, and the question was never whether something lasted. It's what part is worth carrying forward.

So go dig through your own graveyard. Find the one thing that seems to have broken, and try it again, slightly differently. The only real failure is the one where we stop trying.