Failure

We’ve already seen that failure is often not an option in the social sector. When for-profit innovations fail, the consequence is that opportunities for making money don’t materialize. Had we failed in our work in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, the city would have had to find another way to assuage local fears about cancer, because those fears were real and residents had responded by applying a great deal of political and social pressure. When social innovations fail, the challenge isn’t simply the failure of that particular effort, it’s that the underlying social problems don’t go away. The search for solutions must continue, and the social and political capital pressing for solutions must be deployed yet again.

The origins of an effort at social sector innovation are often tied up with this social and political capital. The “investors” are more diverse than simply funders and include local residents, politicians, and other types of sponsors. Practitioners of lean startup need to bring these stakeholders along for the journey by preparing them for the rigors of lean’s Build-Measure-Learn cycle, and we’ll explore some of the ways to do that in coming chapters.

There is also a bit of a paradox in lean startup between Principle 1 (Fail Fast!) and the fact that the status quo is unacceptable for many social problems. The lean startup offers a structured way through this paradox: problems that must be solved are often left to the social sector, but that does not preclude a problem-solving method that is not afraid of failure. Indeed, intractable problems are those that most need our most radical experiments on the route to success.