As president of the World Bank Group, where we work every day for a “world free of poverty,” I come face to face with the problem of how to turn failure into learning. Every mother or child who dies of a preventable disease, every country that can’t feed its people, reminds us that when we fail, often tragically, we don’t learn from it as much as we should.
In the last decade, many international leaders have put great emphasis on measuring results and learning from success and failure. At the Bank, the challenge now is to develop tools that accelerate our ability to learn from mistakes and successes. I’m convinced that revolutionary advances in communications and information processing, when linked to an enlightened approach to failure, can help transform our pursuit of ability to achieve development results, even in the poorest countries.
Let me give you two examples. Not long ago, I was in South Africa. There, leaders spoke to me at length about their struggle to improve the education of young people. They said that they had attained great success in enrolling nearly all eligible schoolchildren in primary school, but they also said that too many children fail in school, and that they are not preparing young people well enough for the job market. I was impressed with their openness, and I left Johannesburg feeling hopeful that South Africa would make progress in improving education. They were determined to learn from their mistakes and find solutions that would work in their country.
Another country I visited recently is China, which is experiencing a historic migration of rural villagers into cities. This has led to significant problems like pollution and traffic congestion. Still, China has made enormous innovations in urbanization that should be shared more broadly, and the Chinese leaders I spoke with also were eager to learn from other countries’ experiences, particularly in the transportation sector. Like the South Africans, the Chinese were eager to learn from the success and failures of others and were both justifiably proud of their achievements in urban planning and very much aware of areas in which they needed to make more progress.
To help China, South Africa, and all of our member countries, the World Bank Group will be setting up what we’re calling delivery knowledge hubs, which will begin by collecting and distributing case studies of both success and failure in tackling the most important development challenges from throughout the world.
When I was president of Dartmouth College, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company gave me some advice that has stayed with me. When thinking about tackling complex, difficult problems, he told me: “It’s not how much you know, it's how fast you learn.”
Learning from failure is hard, complicated work. But all leaders could be well served if they admit what they don’t know and learn from their own and others' experiences. We at the World Bank Group stand ready to work with leaders in both the public and the private sector to learn from success and failure. To take a page out of Google’s playbook, if we “fail fast and learn fast,” we will have a much better chance to end extreme poverty and build shared prosperity in every corner of the world.
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