id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
hbr-org-5273		Strategies for Learning from Failure			.html	text/html	5301	358	57	But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure. Failures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec; unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems; and intelligent ones at the frontier, where "good" failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that I have studied over the past 20 years—pharmaceutical, financial services, product design, telecommunications, and construction companies; hospitals; and NASA's space shuttle program, among others—genuinely wanted to help their organizations learn from failures to improve future performance. People need a shared understanding of the kinds of failures that can be expected to occur in a given work context (routine production, complex operations, or innovation) and why openness and collaboration are important for surfacing and learning from them.	./cache/hbr-org-5273.html	./txt/hbr-org-5273.txt