Make sure that your learning moment is shared with others! Describe your Brilliant Failure in a maximum of 300 words. 

The Brilliant Failure 2011

The main goal of the Brilliant Failure Award is to stimulate more transparency, learning capacity and innovation as a core competence in the broad field of International Development Cooperation. The award is an initiative of The Institute of Brilliant Failures in collaboration with Spark and supported by Partos, PSO, Woord en Daad and Fondsen.org. The winner will receive a honourable award during the Award ceremony event in November 2011 (further details will be published on the special award website: www.brilliantfailures.com/awardDC).

Case submission and criteria

A Brilliant Failure is a well-prepared project with a different outcome than wished for, from which a great learning moment is derived. Describe your best learning moment (not older than 5 years) by answering the following questions:

1. What was the intention?

What was your initial goal? Did you strive with good intentions to achieve your goal? (i.e. not at the expense of others or society at large).

2. What was the approach?

How did you prepare? Which steps did you take to achieve your goal?

Check for yourself: Did you do all you could to prepare as well as possible given your understanding of the conditions at that time?

3. What was the result?

In which way was the result different than intended? What went wrong? (You achieved a different result than intended and perhaps no positive outcome at all).

4. What was the learning moment?

Did you learn something from your failure? Can others learn from it? Was it easy or difficult to discuss the failure of the intended outcome in your organization?