A curious ambiguity surrounds errors in professional working contexts: they must be avoided in case they lead to adverse (and potentially disastrous) results, yet they also hold the key to improving our knowledge and procedures. In a further irony, it seems that a prerequisite for circumventing errors is our remaining open to their potential occurrence and learning from them when they do happen. This volume the first to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives on learning from errors at work, presents theoretical concepts and empirical evidence in an attempt to establish under what conditions professionals deal with errors at work productively - in other words, learn the lessons they contain. By drawing upon and combining cognitive and action-oriented approaches to human error with theories of adult, professional, and workplace learning this book provides valuable insights which can be applied by workers and professionals. It includes systematic theoretical frameworks for explaining learning from errors in daily working life, methodologies and research instruments that facilitate the measurement of that learning, and empirical studies that investigate relevant determinants of learning from errors in different professions. Written by an international group of distinguished researchers from various disciplines, the chapters paint a comprehensive picture of the current state of the art in research on human fallibility and (learning from) errors at work.

Content - 1. The Ambiguity of Errors for Work and Learning: Introduction to the Volume, Part I Errors, Their Learning Potential, and the Processes of Learning from Errors, 2. Errors and Learning from Errors at Work, 3. Tracing Outcomes of Learning from Errors on the Level of Knowledge, 4. Towards a Theory of Negative Knowledge (NK): Almost-Mistakes as Drivers of Episodic Memory Amplification, 5. Professional Knowledge Is (Also) Knowledge About Errors, Part II Methodological Strategies, 6 Research on Errors and Learning from Them: Methodological Perspectives, 7 Measuring Organizational Climate for Learning from Errors at Work, Part III Learning from Errors in the Professions, 8 Innovation by Learning from Mistakes: The Relationships Between Team Characteristics, Error Orientation and Team Innovation, 9 Error Orientation in the Context of Intuitive and Competent Behaviour: Results of an Exploratory Study in the Domain of Emergency Medicine, 10 Human Fallibility and Learning from Errors at Work, Part IV Enabling Learning from Errors, 11 Managing Errors During Training, 12 Reflecting on Learning from Errors in School Instruction: Findings and Suggestions from a Swiss-German Video Study, 13 Learning from Errors: The Role of After-Event Reviews, 14 Incident Reporting Systems in Hospitals: How Does Learning Occur Using this Organisational Instrument? Part V Conclusion, 15 Research on Human Fallibility and Learning from Errors at Work: Challenges for Theory, Research, and Practice, Name Index, Subject Index