In the aftermath of many natural and man-made disasters, people often wonder why those affected were underprepared, especially when the disaster was the result of known or regularly occurring hazards (e.g., hurricanes). We study one contributing factor: prior near-miss experiences. Near misses...

Although organizations appear to learn from obvious failures, we argue that it is harder for them to learn from "near-misses"--events in which chance played a role in averting failure. In this paper, we formalize the concept of near-misses and hypothesize that organizations and managers fail to...