Everybody Fails but Not Everybody Learns: Why Is It So Hard to Learn From Failures?

Failure learning has evolved as a distinct area in the field of organizational learning. Combining insights from management, social psychology, safety studies, and organizational learning, it is a rich and vibrant research domain that studies a phenomenon that affects all organizations and their members on a daily basis. This book presents a curated collection of empirical and theoretical views on failure learning, bringing together 17 leading learning scholars representing 13 universities on three continents. Applying a rich set of theories to more than a dozen different empirical settings, the volume brings novel insights to failure learning while reinforcing previous research. The fundamental questions we seek answers to are: Why do some organizations learn from their failures while others do not? And, why is it so difficult to learn from failures? The insights presented in this volume contribute to a more complete view of what can go wrong and right in failure management, by synthesizing what we know and highlighting new areas of research. The book covers healthcare simulations, surgeons’ failure learning, the problem with nurses’ hand hygiene, and programmers not sharing failure information to prevent status loss. It also explores US Marines who face changing managerial perspectives on failure and learning, and how train accidents have decreased due to regulators promoting best practices in the industry. Additional topics include the challenges of admitting mistakes, understanding conflicting results in learning-curve studies by considering contextual factors, the influence of failure causes on learning speed, particularly with human-caused failures, and a summary of the thirteen most used theories in failure learning studies.