Organizational failures produce cumulative learning through postmortem analysis.

Evidence

Smart officials do not engage in profitable suspect activities knowingly. They do so tacitly with an organizationally structured system of deniability for the upper echelon. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1579 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Failing to communicate information accurately can have tragic consequences, as it did in the case of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old who was playing with a pellet gun when two police officers shot and killed him (Shooting of Tamir Rice, n.d.). … In this case the dispatcher was suspended for eight days for a mistake that could have legitimately saved the twelve-year-old’s life. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 282 (#complicates, via linked claim)

There is a danger of becoming “bureaucratised”, it is true; but every organic continuity presents this danger, which must be watched. The danger of discontinuity, of improvisation, is still greater. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 802 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Organizations systematically forget or distort lessons from past failures.; Organizationally structured deniability keeps executives from knowing wrongdoing — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1579; Leading economists frame post-crisis failures as pedagogical noise rather than systemic defects — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 15 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Organizationally structured deniability keeps executives from knowing wrongdoing #complicates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1579
• Institutional responses to fatal bias mistakes remain symbolic and disproportionately mild #complicates (0.78) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 282
• Organizational discontinuity and improvisation outweigh the risk of bureaucratization #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 802