Purpose This paper aims to summarize four decades of research into organizational adaptation, learning and unlearning. Design/methodology/approach The most important contributions to this stream of research have been case studies of organizations struggling to survive serious crises. Findings...

This study analyzes the outcomes of fourteen strategic failures in a very large European telecommunication firm. The study asks what the company learned from these failures. Does learning from failure differ from learning from success? How does the learning from large failures differ from...

Research provides some observations about learning from events that appear to be rare or quite unusual. All learning has uncertain consequences, but learning from rare events is especially problematic. Learners see many idiosyncrasies and exogenous interference, tendencies that suppress learning...