Study Examines Why Organizations Repeat Big Mistakes

AUSTIN, Texas - On the 30th anniversary of the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, recent research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin examines why large organizations as diverse as NASA and BP have a tendency to make the same mistakes again and again, sometimes with serious and far-reaching consequences. The study, written by Professor Emeritus Pamela Haunschild and Associate Professor Francisco Polidoro of the McCombs School and Assistant Professor David Chandler of the University of Colorado Denver, was published this fall in the journal Organization Science . Previous research argued that organizations either learn from their mistakes or don't, but the new research shows that organizations across all industries actually go through cycles of learning and forgetting, and the periods of forgetting can have tragic (but preventable) outcomes. The learning stage of the cycle typically occurs after an organization has just experienced a significant accident, referred to throughout the study as a "serious error." Serious errors push firms toward a focus on safety but consequently pull them away from other priorities, such as efficiency or innovation. Over time, the effect of a serious error on safety weakens (or is forgotten), allowing alternative activities to emerge that lead to subsequent errors. Researchers already know that these errors are disruptive within companies, but Polidoro's study explains how the behavior of the same organization changes over time to cause the repeated errors in the first place.