The importance of work context in organizational learning from error

A growing body of research has increased scholarly and managerial awareness of the enormous potential for organizations to learn from errors. This paper investigates the range of work contexts in which errors occur in organizations and the implications of this variation for organizational learning from error. By organizational learning from error, we refer to organizational activities that both build understanding of what went wrong to cause an error and identify ways to prevent the same or similar errors from occurring in the future. We suggest that different kinds of work give rise to different conditions of error, and these distinctions influence what organizational approach and actions are best to maximize potential learning from an error.