We recently analysed a year’s worth of incidents for a client to find out which human and organisational factors were perpetuating failures.

One issue was too much investigation effort happening on low-consequence potential events. The second was an uncomfortably large number of hi-po incidents flying under their radar.

This is actually situation-normal for all clients we work with, which means a lot of wasted effort and learning opportunity.

This is firstly a system issue. Disincentives are hard-wired into performance recognition systems and follow-up expectations making calling out the big mistakes undesirable.

But it’s also an issue of cognitive bias:

• Anchoring bias places too much weight on superficial initial information, and overwhelms the usefulness of subsequent information.
• Confirmation bias has us looking for and responding only to information that supports our initial judgement.
• Hindsight bias tells us we “knew this would happen” AFTER it has happened, but we didn’t consider the possibility BEFORE it happened.
• Representative bias has us wrongly comparing two situations because we think they are similar on the face of things despite different context.

Do any of these biases affect your organisation’s ability to learn from things that go wrong?

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