Near-Miss Evaluation Bias as an Obstacle to Organizational Learning: Lessons from NASA

After the Shuttle Columbia catastrophe, the investigation board (CAIB) stated that NASA needs to develop a "learning culture", meaning a capability to learn from past failures by understanding the technical and organizational causes of these mistakes (CAIB report, 2003). While many organizations learn from obvious failures, we argue that it is harder for organizations to learn from near-miss events (i.e., situations where a failure does not occur but nearly did), because these near-misses are processed as successes. For the shuttle program, prior debris problems could have caused a similar failure as on the Columbia mission except that the large pieces missed the highly sensitive portions of the orbiter. This acceptance of foam debris was adopted as a normal occurrence by the shuttle program managers similar to the problems at the time of the Challenger Disaster (detailed in Vaughan, 1996). We extend that work to show that an outcome bias influences people's evaluation of project managers, such that managers of failed missions were perceived more poorly than managers who made the same decisions but whose mission ended in either success or a near-miss. The similarity of ratings between the near-miss and success condition imply that even when a problem occurs that is clearly linked to prior managerial decisions, if the project is not harmed because of good luck, that manager is not held accountable for faculty decision making and neither the individual manager nor the organization learn from the experience potentially increasing the likelihood of a failure in the future

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Negotiating in the United States and Hong Kong

We proposed that cultural values (self-enhancement, self-transcendences, conservatism, and openness to change) provide a social environment where some negotiation strategies are selected to survive over others. These selected negotiation strategies become normative. Results from a negotiation simulation in the United States and Hong Kong indicate that U.S. negotiators are more likely to subscribe to self-interest and joint problems solving norms, and Hong Kong Chinese negotiators are more likely to subscribe to an equality norm. Further, U.S. negotiators report more satisfaction when they maximize joint gain and Hong Kong Chinese negotiators are happier when they achieve outcome parity. The reported norms and outcome evaluations are consistent with the value profiles of the two cultures. The implications of these cultural differences are discussed in terms of expanding U.S. based negotiation theory.© 1998 JIBS. Journal of International Business Studies (1998) 29, 711–727

How Controlling Failure Perceptions Affects Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment

We conducted a clustered randomized field experiment with 20 Brazilian distributorships of a multinational direct sales organization to examine whether controlling failure perceptions through formal communications increases performance. We used the organization's weekly sales meetings to deliver a video-based message from the regional head that either communicates workers should view failure as a natural part of learning rather than an indictment of their ability (treatment condition) or simply summarizes the organization's history (control condition). We find that those who were assigned to the treatment condition were more likely to sustain their effort in response to the economic adversity that coincided with our experiment. Additional analyses suggest that our treatment accomplished this by increasing job-specific confidence and by reinforcing social norms that encourage workers to persevere after failure. Overall, our findings highlight that formal communications from senior management are a viable control mechanism for sustaining effort in the face of failure