Minnesota Institute of Public Health

At MIPH, we achieve our mission and make our living mostly by competitively bid grants. We like our batting average, but sometimes despite our best efforts, we don't get the award.

There was a time when if we did NOT get the award, we fretted, wondered what went awry, why the funding source got it wrong. We became a better MIPH at the point in our own introspection when we considered they might be right: that despite our very competitive application, someone else did a better one.

We licked our wounds and identified the takeaways including asking how we might have done better in our proposal. Sometimes reading the winning grant which once it becomes a contract is generally public information, has helped us see the competition from the funder's and the winner's perspective.

One of the great fictional characters in American literature is southern small town attorney Atticus Finch. The protagonist in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Finch explained the process of personal growth to his young daughter Scout by saying, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."

We aren't always right, but we can always be better.

Tell us how you learn from your organization's setbacks. And, see you out there on the playing field...