BY LAURENCE LIEN, CHAIRMAN
We don’t talk about failure very easily—especially in Asia.
We are taught from a young age to succeed, to avoid shame, to save face. Many of us have built our lives on the idea that success defines who we are.
So when we fail—in our case, when something in our philanthropy doesn’t go as planned—our instinct is often to go quiet.
We move on. We reframe the story. We tell ourselves it was a ‘learning experience,’ but we rarely say what it was we actually learned.
Or—sometimes, we do. But most of the time, we are actually disguising failure as a success story, or what we now call humble bragging. It often goes like this: “My initial failure was this…. but it actually turned into a big success.” (The real message: Look how great I am!)
Yet we need to be able to acknowledge a failure for what it is. Something painful. Something we wished we hadn’t experienced. But also—failure can be where wisdom actually lives.
Talking about failure isn’t about self-criticism; it is about using the experience to make the whole field wiser and help others avoid similar mistakes. It is about enhancing mutual trust and tightening our bonds as a community—where we can be truly honest and allow others to share our burden. It is also about setting the stage to take on bolder actions, because we find it easier to overcome our fears of failure—which often hold us back.
In a recent session I facilitated at APC’s anniversary summit, I invited everyone to share about their own failures, or about their fear of failure with one another. This is an invitation I similarly extend to you, to find someone you trust to share this burden, and to help you pry the valuable lessons that can help you get back on the horse after falling.
In this reflection, I encourage you to focus on embracing failure: it is okay to fail. To ask what failure can and is teaching us. And to approach this reflection with love, with gentleness, and with openness and humility.
This is the kind of space we have aspired APC to be—to be a circle where we hold both success and failure with equal grace, knowing that both are essential to growth.
Make it personal
I will start. Let me share a very fresh, very raw failure that I have had to confront this year.
Some of you may know that a few APC members had been working together on a purpose-built, best-in-class Assisted Living Facility. I have led this collaborative project since 2016. For many reasons—it was often stop-and-start; but this year, the train finally arrived at the station. The architect was appointed. We got into full-swing: APC appointed a market research firm to conduct an in-depth market-sounding exercise. We hired business consultants to update our business model. We hired lawyers and finance consultants to advise us.
So we boarded the train, and the train was about to leave.
But on 28 Sep, a Sunday, I had to write to each and every one of the APC members involved in this project with the news that we had to get off the train.
Why did we do this? I was concerned that we were no longer able to fulfil our original purpose of creating a best-in-class ALF model for Singapore. Due to much higher construction costs post-COVID, we’ve had to make considerable compromises in the design: residents would have limited personal space they can value as their own home, and limited common space for active community life.
The price of the product would have to rise significantly and was also a risk. Our intent was to make the project financially sustainable so that it could be more easily replicated. However, the cost of the project meant either we had to keep the price low and increase financial risks, or raise the price and deviate from our original target residents.
So we exited the project, with an extremely heavy heart. We had invested so much time and effort. Many others have also contributed both pro-bono and low-bono services. Our implementing partner also had to go back to the drawing board and rework the design.
Might this failure turn out to be productive? Maybe. We could still participate in a project within the completed facility. We could work on a related project, providing assisted living services, without investing in the hardware. We certainly learnt a lot together in the past years on what it takes to design an ALF—we will be documenting all our lessons for everyone to learn from.
On the other hand, failure may not always be productive—and that’s okay. Anyone who has ever had to pull the plug on a long-loved project knows it comes with its own mini-grief cycle—part heartbreak, part hard truths. My colleague Nan Li at APC helped me come up with our own version of mapping our way through: the five steps of pulling the plug without losing your soul.
- Listening to your instincts and inner voice. Take a step back to bring what is nagging at the back of your mind into the fore, and confront the tough questions.
- Diagnosing the situation. Review holistically your key original intent, and whether what you are doing is sufficiently aligned.
- Making the call. Make the final decision – cut when ‘good’ is not enough…. or forge ahead with the risks fully apprised. … Don’t be swayed by the sunk costs.
- Emotional reckoning. The grieving process starts if the decision is to terminate. Have your emotions validated, practise self-care and share the burden with others.
- Acceptance—and finding the courage to keep trying. Talk about it with your team and others. Conduct a blame-free analysis, and move on to the next project!
As the whistles blew and the steam billowed at the tracks, stepping off the train was both a failure and an act of courage—painful, real, and deeply personal. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, but rather the quiet strength to face uncertainty, to let go, to move forward when the path is unclear. In acknowledging failure, we build a space for learning and growth, where we can begin to choose what comes next.
Once we’ve bravely taken that step, a few questions remain—for ourselves, and the communities we serve: What is holding you back? What fears stand in the way of action? Where do we need courage to move forward—both personally and collectively? Giving them a name then becomes our first act of bravery after failure.