​​​​​​Eleanor Roosevelt has been credited with saying "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself". Bill Nye (yes, the science guy) reminds us that “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't". And Voltaire once said, “Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?".

These three quotes, spoken decades and even centuries apart, point us all to the inherent value found in lessons learned should we choose to actually learn from them. Yet often, we are reluctant to share many of the lessons we have either personally or organizationally learned, for fear of being associated with our failures and associated errors. Christopher Burns, in his book, “Deadly Decisions", states “The danger in minimizing errors, misjudgments, and conflicts of interest is that these risks then go uncorrected, and they repeat themselves in other organizations. Nothing is learned." Why would we not allow others the benefits of the knowledge we've gained regardless of how we came to acquire it?

Academic research consistently shows that how we approach failure, both individually and/or organizationally, can enable us to journey towards becoming highly reliable, or shackle us to the same confines in which our errors lead us to a destination we had no intention of arriving at. Ironically, we stand to gain more by looking at the failures of others than we do by looking at the successes of others. This presentation will look at both the cognitive and psychological aspects of failure, and how we as leaders, can choose which lens in which to view failure through. Taking case studies from both the aviation and oil refinery industries, we'll look at how we can benefit from the knowledge, experience and mistakes of others in the past, to help others in the future.​