The near-miss bias in decision making

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report states that NASA needs to develop an organizational culture that reflects the best characteristics of a learning organization and that NASA historically has not demonstrated such characteristics. When there is a technical failure, most organizations are good at identifying the technical cause and learning not to repeat that same mistake. However, it is more difficult to learn from near-misses and lucky successes (i.e., situations where a technical failure does not occur but nearly did) (MacCormack, 2004). This research shows that managers whose decisions ended in a failure were perceived as significantly less competent, as having made poorer decisions, and as less deserving of promotions than managers that made the same decisions but whose project outcomes were either a success or a near miss. Moreover, there were no significant differences in the perceptions of a manager's competence or promotability when that manager's decisions resulted in a near-miss or a complete success. Therefore, even when a problem occurs that is linked to prior managerial decisions, if the project outcome is successful, that manager may not be held as accountable for any faulty decision making compared to managers of projects that fail. These results indicate a potential mechanism to explain why organizations fail to learn from their successes