Failure is an inevitable consequence of life. None is immune and every person, organisation, or country will confront failure. It does not distinguish between colour, race, class, religion, gender, economic circumstances, political ideologies, or governments. And failure comes in many forms–personal failures, business ventures, policy, process, or system failures. It has been said that failure is the indispensable companion of success, as each failure is meant to teach a lesson.
People or corporations are successful not because they have not made mistakes, but because they incorporated the learnings from those mistakes into their operations, which helped them when the next challenge came. Bill Gates is credited with saying that it is fine to celebrate success, but it is important to learn the lessons of failure. In medicine, doctors follow protocols which are built on the lessons from medical error. Adherence to those protocols may mean the difference between life and death. As one chief pilot indicated, each aviation procedure is built on blood. Same with engineering disciplines, or any discipline.
The foregoing indicates that it is important to diagnose the reason and the causes that contributed to a failure. This is required to determine what measures could have been implemented to prevent the error or mitigate its impact. Risk management is a new field which has been developed to assist in pre-empting or minimising the effect of failure by using diagnostic tools.
Like every other country, T&T has had its share of failed policies, strategies, and plans, leading one expert to suggest that the country suffers from “an implementation deficit”. However, that label suffers from the difficulty identified by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which she describes as the peril of “a single story”, meaning that truth is complex, and oversimplification leads to false perceptions about the true nature of reality.
Governments have spent hundreds of millions on commissions of inquiry. And it is not clear that the recommendations of those commissions have ever been adopted, far less implemented. This raises questions about whether such inquiries (Prisons, UFF, Las Alturas, CLICO,1990 Coup etc) are mechanisms to deflect public criticisms for political and public relations purposes rather than address and correct fundamental issues.
Correcting failure requires clarity of purpose and a commitment to action. More importantly, it requires that the error must be acknowledged and owned if there is meant to be any commitment to correcting the error. Governments (and ministers) routinely avoid acknowledging failure as it reflects poorly on their image and their electoral chances.
Failure is rarely due to a single cause. A good example is the 2022 SEA results and the Education Ministry’s response. The results were so bad that the ministry immediately reacted, attributing the performance failure to the lockdowns caused by COVID, arguing that it had a negative impact on those sitting exams. Consequently, the ministry determined that an immediate remedial plan was required to address those who made less than 50 per cent. It noted that those who made ten per cent or less would be required to resit the exam next year.
But was this only due to COVID? Whilst it is expected that the lockdowns would have had an impact, did the lockdown expose wider systemic policy and management failures?
The ministry’s explanation was not accompanied by multi-year comparison to show how many students routinely scored less than 50 per cent in previous years. What are the trends? Further, how many students normally enter secondary school scoring greater than ten per cent and less than 50 per cent? Why would a student scoring 30 per cent or less be “promoted” to secondary school? Are there remedial programmes as a matter of course to address the learning needs of this group of “successful” SEA students? If not, why not? Has their progress been tracked over the years? How are these students placed and in what schools?
These are important questions, which generate even more questions on the need for better and more incisive data on the performance of schools at the primary level. Are learning failures at every level in the school system routinely monitored? Indeed, learning deficiencies did not simply take place at the SEA level because of the lockdowns. They occurred all along the education supply chain, from preschool to Standard Five in the primary school system and from Form One through six in the secondary system.
Education, health, and national security account for the largest percentage of the national budget, with good reason. These are not simple problems, and they are connected. But failing to address them will have long-term detrimental effects on T&T’s only sustainable resource, the capacity of its people.