Don’t sweat the small stuff? Superstitious Organizational Learning from Experience with Near Misses

Abstract

A near-miss is an event where the possibility of a failure is present but does not materialize. Many organizations in high-hazard industries have recently adopted near-miss learning systems in the hope that their members will learn from such events to prevent significant failures from occurring in the future. The challenge with correctly learning from near misses is that since the event is not a failure, decision makers must recognize that although a negative event did not happen, it might have occurred. If decision makers do not correctly distinguish between successes and near-misses, organizations and their members can systematically take away the wrong lessons from the event and future performance could decline (rather than improve) as experience accumulates. This negative learning pattern, referred to as “superstitious learning,” has been identified in other contexts, but has not been explored in connection to near misses. In addition to exploring the role of near-misses in superstitious learning, we also explore what signals for learning are provided from heterogeneous versus homogenous near-miss experiences. We use data from reportable safety incidents in the US coal mining industry and a behavioral study set in the context of a coal mining decision to test our hypotheses.