Failure Learning: An Introduction

The chapter introduces the concept of failure learning, discusses the motivation for the book, and provides an overview of its key chapters. The book covers various settings, including 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 declined 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, and the influence of failure causes on learning speed, particularly with human-caused failures. An initial chapter on models used in failure-learning studies and a chapter featuring interviews with an aviation expert, a surgeon, and business executives about their experiences with failure further enrich the volume.