‘Right is to be taught even by the enemy.’ —Ovid
Studying the satellite launch industry, Madsen and Desai (2010) find that the probability of a successful future launch increases with the cumulative number of failed launches.
KC, Staats, and Gino (2013) find almost exactly the opposite at the individual level, showing that individual surgeons future success is positively influenced by their past cumulative number of successes and negatively by their past cumulative number of failures. While a surgeon’s future success rate is negatively correlated with his or her cumulative number of failures, it is positively correlated with the cumulative number of failures of other surgeons in the same hospital. […]
While the exact channels vary from context to context, the empirical literature is clear: individuals and organizations learn from failure, be it their own or the failure of others. […]
[M]any failures go unreported and their lessons are lost.
photo { William Eggleston, Untitled, 1960 }
