Repositioning Organizational Failure Through Active Acceptance

This paper considers the way organizations respond to failure by actively repositioning the failed outcome as success. When an organization fails to meet planned goals, they do not necessarily learn from the experience, automatically terminate the plan, or persist with the failing course of action. Instead, another response is to shift original aspirations by recasting what was achieved, acting as if the ensuing failure is positive, despite indicators suggesting otherwise. As a mode of organizational interpretation, this repositioning reformats the criteria for what is success in order to move forward, enabling organizations to continue failed outcomes and their tasks that are well past their use-by date. After detailing this adjustment, we model an active-acceptance protocol on failure, discussing whether organizational effectiveness is predictable from how firms respond to failure in this way. The paper fills a gap in dialogue specific to failing by opening an alternative path to understand how organizations frame failure differently.

Learning From Failure in an Organization Designed to Develop Success

In this article, I discuss events associated with leadership and fiscal crises that occurred at NTL during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after Warren Bennis declined to accept the Director position and until a group of NTL members led by Edith Seashore “rescued” NTL in 1975. In particular, I consider Warner Burke’s experience in the midst of these events. This episode in the history of NTL enables us to reflect on important questions about relationships between the theory and practice of Organization Development and learning from organizational failure.