How can individuals, groups and organizations learn from failure? - 14 Oct 2020

Although organizations and individuals tend to focus on learning from success, research has shown that failure can yield crucial insights in various contexts that range from small mistakes and errors, product recalls, accidents, and medical errors to large-scale disasters.

Through a literature review, Kristina Dahlin and colleagues identify three mechanisms—opportunity, motivation, and ability—through which individuals, groups, and organizations learn from failure, and bridge the gaps between different levels of analysis.

Their review also leads them to distinguish between erroneous versus correct processes and adverse versus successful outcomes to better understand the full gamut of events that are faced by organizations. They identify the existence of a noisy learning environment, where spurious successes (when erroneous processes still lead to successful outcomes) and spurious failures (when correct processes are combined with adverse outcomes) lower the opportunities to learn.

Considering noisy learning situations is helpful when understanding the differences between slow- and fast-learning environments. They conclude their review by identifying a number of unexplored areas they hope scholars will address to better the understanding of failure learning.

Building and extending from the review she will also present US freight accidents, as an example of an empirical setting that has enjoyed great success in failure, in this case accident reduction.