Learning From Failures

Learning from Failures provides techniques to explore the root causes of specific disasters and how we can learn from them. It focuses on a number of well-known case studies, including: the sinking of the Titanic; the BP Texas City incident; the Chernobyl disaster; the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia accident; the Bhopal disaster; and the Concorde accident. This title is an ideal teaching aid, informed by the author’s extensive teaching and practical experience and including a list of learning outcomes at the beginning of each chapter, detailed derivation, and many solved examples for modeling and decision analysis. This book discusses the value in applying different models as mental maps to analyze disasters. The analysis of these case studies helps to demonstrate how subjectivity that relies on opinions of experts can be turned into modeling approaches that can ensure repeatability and consistency of results. The book explains how the lessons learned by studying these individual cases can be applied to a wide range of industries. This work is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and will also be useful for industry professionals who wish to avoid repeating mistakes that resulted in devastating consequences. Explores the root cause of disasters and various preventative measures Links theory with practice in regard to risk, safety, and reliability analyses Uses analytical techniques originating from reliability analysis of equipment failures, multiple criteria decision making, and artificial intelligence domains

Much of the knowledge used to design, build, and operate engineered facilities and products is gained by learning from failures. As catastrophic building failures become ever more costly, this book helps readers understand key issues, from determining the causes of failure and isolating failed parts to lessening personal liability through proper contracting, planning, and management.

Evaluation Failures: 22 Tales of Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned is a candid collection of stories from seasoned evaluators from a variety of sectors sharing professional mistakes they have made in the past, and what they learned moving forward. As the only book of its kind, editor Kylie Hutchinson has collected a series of engaging, real-life examples that are both entertaining and informative. Each story offers universal lessons as takeaways, and discussion questions for reflective practice. The book is the perfect companion to anyone working in the evaluation field, and to instructors of program evaluation courses who want to bring the real world into their classroom.

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

"IT veteran Dave Zweiback describes an incident that threatens the very existence of a large financial institution, and the counterintuitive steps its leadership took to stop the downward spiral. Their novel approach is grounded in proven concepts from complexity science, resilience engineering, human factors, cognitive science, and organizational psychology. It allows us to identify the underlying conditions for failure, and make our systems (and organizations) safer and more resilient."--Page 4 of cover.

Numerous advances in basic research, surgical techniques, practice, and patient care have revolutionized surgery over the last 60 years and made the field with its many subspecialties more diverse but also more complex. The surgical profession places high demands on surgeons who must often make the right split-second decisions. This can easily lead to misjudgments or mistakes. Learning From Failures in Orthopedic Trauma—Key Points for Success is the first book of its kind to give surgeons the opportunity to learn from failures without making them themselves. Based on the Spanish book Errores en la Osteosíntesis by Rafael Orozco Delclós, this publication offers real case examples that have been collected over the past 25 years. It is an essential and valuable resource as it specifically examines the reasons and responses to surgical error in real cases from different anatomical regions of the body, thus helping surgeons avoid the most frequent errors in osteosynthesis. The collection of more than 70 cases will help surgeons recognize and avoid common failures, start reflecting in action, present failures as positive learning opportunities, and bring that knowledge into their daily practice. The book is divided into 9 sections that analyze different types of failures. Key features are: Analysis of failures to help surgeons avoid making mistakes that lead to those errors More than 20 detailed and illustrative case-based chapters that analyze failures and offer tips to successfully prevent those mistakes More than 1,100 x-rays, clinical images, and illustrations

In The Freedom to Fail, veteran educator Andrew K. Miller explains the many benefits of intentionally designing opportunities for students to "fail forward" in the classroom. He provides a raft of strategies for ensuring that students experience small, constructive failures as a means to greater achievement, and offers practical suggestions for ensuring that constructive failure doesn't detrimentally affect students' summative assessments. He also describes how teachers, too, can benefit from failure. Establishing a culture that embraces the freedom to fail helps students to adopt a growth mindset, take risks in the service of greater learning, and develop realistic expectations of what it takes to succeed in the world at large. If we deliberately let our students fail in small ways today, we can help to ensure that they'll triumph in a big way tomorrow.