Study Finds Not All Failures Lead to Learning

Surgeons in a futuristic operating room with a holographic image of a patient's heart hovering above the patient. Surgeons in a futuristic operating room with a holographic image of a patient's heart hovering above the patient.

Academic Research by: Sunkee Lee

In a study published in the Strategic Management Journal, researchers at the Tepper School and Clark University examined the high-stakes field of cardiothoracic surgery to assess the relationship between experiences with failures and learning outcomes. The study found that individuals reach a threshold at which they stop learning from failures, and this threshold is higher for surgeons with a higher perceived ability to learn.

Individual learning is a cornerstone of organizational learning, and personal experiences of failure are seen as critical sources of learning. However, studies have yielded contrasting findings and theories. It is unlikely that failures solely trigger processes conducive to learning without also preventing learning, and vice versa. These processes likely coexist, with one dominating under certain conditions.

“Understanding this dynamic process is crucial to predicting how a particular failure affects learning,” said Sunkee Lee, associate professor of organizational theory and strategy at the Tepper School. “This is especially important in high-stakes contexts like patient-care settings.”

Researchers proposed and tested a theoretical model on individual learning from failure, considering the effects of opportunity, motivation, and perceived ability to learn from failures. They used data on more than 300 California-based cardiothoracic surgeons who performed coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries between 2003 and 2018. Failure was defined as patient deaths resulting from CABG surgeries, and learning was measured through performance improvements after such experiences.

They found that surgeons’ performance increased with accumulated failures up to a point, then declined. The findings suggest that accumulating failures triggers forces that both increase the opportunity to learn and decrease the motivation to learn. The inflection point came later for surgeons hypothesized to have higher perceived learning abilities — those with elite training and specialized expertise. These individuals likely had stronger motivation to learn and were less vulnerable to negative emotions and attribution biases.

“Our findings suggest that not all experiences lead to learning, and repeated failures can have both beneficial and harmful impacts on learning processes,” explained Jisoo Park, assistant professor of management at Clark University. “Both impacts must be considered to understand and improve performance.”
A vector illustration of two doctors studying a human heart diagram.

The study has implications for organizational design, especially in hiring and training. Organizations can improve performance by hiring employees who are resilient to repeated failures or by training them to become so.

The study was supported by the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation, and Knowledge at the Tepper School.