Inaugural Event: May 2012, somewhere breathtaking in the world.
Idea: A safe open space where people expose their failures worth sharing and learning from. Failure is human, but we hide it in an effort to show the world we’ve done something really great just by pure genius- which is often not the case. Most successes are the fruits of many failures. If we keep reinventing the failure wheel, we keep setting ourselves back further as a society. If we exposed our failures to one another, perhaps we’d be able to build and make bigger, more important mistakes that would shine light on more incredible solutions. I truly believe the impact this could have in uplifting the disadvantaged of the world, at a time when we are headed for a downward spiral of poverty, could be immense.
Mission: I envision Hindsight as a new brand. A revolutionary way to think about our failures. My vision is for the conference to be only the starting point- I plan for Hindsight to have actionable items formed during the conference, for & by the attendees. Action items that people will continue to converse around in a safe online space, ongoing. The existing problem today is that most conferences have tons of energy AT the conference, but it dissipates quickly afterwards as people get back to their normal lives. It makes for a great conversation in that moment, but little to be done afterwards. The key ingredient here will be to curate the audience and speakers to be sure they are people who don’t simply want to drop in and out of this conversation, but truly want to put their brains together on how we can welcome and appreciate failure, and grow from it. People who want to begin to change the way we define failure in our own lives and others’ lives, and how we approach it both from the front end and the back end will be imperative.
Format: The conference will be at most 1/4th sitting and listening to speakers, and at least 3/4ths workshopping and moving around, talking about the specific failures and how to avoid them in the future in order to make bigger failures and bigger successes.
As part of inaugural conference, I plan to converse with attendees around options going in on what the next steps could be, so that attendees can come together to help realize next steps that they find inspiring.
Seed funding: Hindsight is currently looking for potential investors.
Revenue: The attendees will pay a minimum of $333 to attend the inaugural Hindsight conference.
The Hindsight team will hold control for where and when the conferences/other events related to this are held- so it will be a brand-name that can be “X”ed out to others accordingly. It can also be appended to existing conferences as a workshop focused on failures in a specific forward thinking fashion. (Tested this out at Summit Series in April 2011 and TEDxGoldenGateEd in June 2011)
Furthermore, corporations willing to associate themselves with the Hindsight name and hoping to shed a humble constructive light on their failures, ie. BP, Coke, Honda, Twitter can become corporate sponsors.
Market Comparison: In the line of failure conversations, two conferences and one online space exist: http://failcon2010.com/, http://failfaire.org/, http://www.admittingfailure.com/ respectively.
Failcon: Conference focusing on silicon valley tech startup failures.
Failfaire: Conference focusing on ICT and Mobiles for development failures
Admitting Failure: Online space focusing on failures in the development sector.
There are numerous conferences around success: TED being the most highly regarded of all.
The Hindsight brand will focus upon bringing to light failures in multiple sectors- corporate, social, life and how each sector can teach others about different fortes in failure insights- both online and offline. The online sphere will bring together a video based online atmosphere combined with a facebook-like conversational space to converse and share thoughts around specific videos, learnings, failures, and insights.
Team: Shabnam Aggarwal is a passionate reformer of all things Education. Her desire to run a Failure Conference began at the Unreasonable Institute in July of 2010, after failing to create a sustainable educational social enterprise in India, and realizing that her failure might have been prevented had she access to previous failures of similar educational initiatives. She decided then that the term failure had to be redefined, reevaluated, and it’s connotation needed reforming. Her belief is that sweeping failures under the rug is no longer the appropriate measure to evolve our society for the greater good.
The team of advisors & collaborators currently includes:
Tyler Emerson, Founder Singularity Institute ED
Nicole Johnson, COO Brain Collector
Clay Hebert, Chief Engagement Officer Tribes Win
Joshua Neubert, Exec Director Conrad Foundation
Ralph Vacca, Co-Founder Kognito
Amy Smith, Founder MIT D-lab
Rafe Furst, CEO Accelerating Possibilities
Anthony Adams, Chief Trouble Maker DetentionSlip.org
Nina Hodjat, Pro-Bono Legal Advisor
& 130+ collaborators on a facebook group page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_188864844488681
“It is fundamentally about evolution. Humans evolve faster than other animals and move from less to more complexity simply because we can verbally share the lessons of mistakes so other people don’t have to make them again.” Nathaniel Whittemore
“We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn’t. Success often lies just the other side of failure.” Leo F. Buscaglia