Monday 16 August 2010

The dangers of learning by Doing

Two American researchers, Peter Madsen and Vinit Desai examined firms, private and public, that launch rockets designed to place satellites into orbit around the Earth. They looked at all orbital launch attempts between the deployment of the first Sputnik in October 1957 and March 2004. Their research, reported in the Academy of Management Journal, showed that when a satellite fails the company learns from that failure and is more likely to succeed with future launches.

This is interesting and valuable research and we should apply the findings to the biggest problem we face today. That is pending economic and ecosystem collapse. The logic that this will be the outcome if we continue with business as usual is hard to dispute. But we seem to be determined to experience failure before we will learn. The research shows that to experience ecosystem collapse would indeed be a good opportunity to change our processes and learn to run society rather better.

This is the nature of humans to learn more from experience than lessons drawn from logical deductions. So, failed rocket launches proved a better teacher. For one satellite it is a big bill picked up by the insurance company; for our planet this is a learning experience we can ill afford.

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