دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله عدم موفقیت در یادگیری و یادگیری عدم موفقیت (نشریه الزویر 2005)

عدم موفقیت در یادگیری و یادگیری عدم موفقیت (از لحاظ عقلانی): سازمانهای بزرگ چگونه عدم موفقیت را برای نوآوری و بهبود بکار می گیرند

Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Innovate and Improve

Organizations are widely encouraged to learn from their failures, but it is something most find easier to espouse than to effect. This article synthesizes the authors’ wide research in this field to offer a strategy for achieving the objective. Their framework relates technical and social barriers to three key activities e identifying failure, analyzing failure and deliberate experimentation e to develop six recommendations for action. They suggest that these be implemented as an integrated set of practices by leaders who can ‘walk the talk’ and work to shift the managerial mindset in a way that redefines failure away from its discreditable associations, and view it instead as a critical first step in a journey of discovery and learning.

1 Introduction

The idea that people and the organizations in which they work should learn from failure has considerable popular support e and even seems obvious e yet organizations that systematically learn from failure are rare. This article provides insight into what makes learning from failure so difficult to put into practice e that is, we address the question of why organizations fail to learn from failure.

We also note that very few organizations experiment effectively e an activity that necessarily generates failures while trying to discover successes e to maximize the opportunity for learning from failure and minimize its cost. In short, we argue that organizations should not only learn from failure e they should learn to fail intelligently as a deliberate strategy to promote innovation and improvement. In this article, we identify the barriers embedded in both technical and social systems that make such intelligent use of failure rare in organizations, and we offer recommendations for managers seeking to improve their organization’s ability to learn from failure.

Research foundations and core ideas

Over the past decade or so, our research has revealed impediments to organizational learning from failure on multiple levels of analysis. The first author has investigated individuals’ psychological responses to their own failures, demonstrating the aversive emotions people experience and how that inhibits learning. The second author has identified group and organizational factors they limit learning from failure in teams and organizations. We have worked together for a number of years to conceptualize and develop recommendations for how to enable organizational learning from failure, drawing from our own and others’ research. In this article, we hope to provoke reflection and point to possibilities for managerial action by synthesizing diverse ideas and examples that illuminate both the challenges and advantages of learning from failure.

We have three core aims. First, we aim to provide insights about what makes organizational learning from failure difficult, paying particular attention to what we see as a lack of understanding of the essential processes involved in learning from failure in a complex organizational system such as a corporation, hospital, university, or government agency.