For You-Ta Chuang, a professor in the School of Administrative Studies, failure is more than a setback – it’s a window into why some people, companies and industries learn and others do not.
When a hospital implements a new procedure that backfires, or an airline introduces a safety protocol that fails, these mistakes offer an opportunity to improve and do better. But as we’ve seen in real-world incidents – from recurring medical errors to preventable airline mishaps – not all organizations take that chance, and lessons are sometimes lost.
Exploring why that happens has been Chuang’s focus for nearly two decades. Why do some missteps lead to meaningful change, while others are ignored?
His academic career, through numerous articles, has examined how people, organizations and industries respond to missteps, and how setbacks can drive adaptation, better practices and systemic change. He has shown particular interest in the health-care sector, studying medical errors that affect patient safety and how leadership and unit culture shape whether lessons are applied.
In 2018, his work culminated in the article “Opportunity, motivation, and ability to learn from failure and errors: Review, synthesis, and ways to move forward,” published in the Academy of Management Annals. Co-authored with Kristina Dahlin, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, the review paper – which Chuang notes has been widely cited – synthesized more than 300 research articles from management and health-care journals.
Its goal was to consolidate existing knowledge on how organizations benefit from mistakes and clarify the field. The paper concluded that while failure can be a powerful source of improvement, people and organizations need the opportunity, motivation and ability to take advantage of it. These insights could help guide organizations in designing systems and practices that make learning from mistakes more likely.
The article didn’t just summarize previous research – it also reflected Chuang’s enduring interest in exploring failure more broadly. Addressing this issue requires looking at mistakes from multiple angles – from interpersonal dynamics that shape individual learning to organizational and policy structures that influence entire industries.
In the years since, he has continued to examine the disconnect between knowing and doing, and why some people and organizations translate failure into progress while others do not.
That focus shaped his most recent project, the book Everybody Fails But Not Everybody Learns, another collaboration with Dahlin that features contributions from 17 scholars across 15 universities.
Instead of writing the book themselves, the co-authors decided to bring in a wider range of voices. By including scholars and practitioners from fields like aviation, space exploration and manufacturing, they wanted to show how experiences of failure can differ across industries and what conditions enable improvement.
Chuang also wanted to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To achieve this, several chapters were informed directly by practitioner interviews, while others combined academic literature with frontline perspectives. The book is designed to encourage both scholars and practitioners to think about how insights from failures can be applied, offering a framework that could inform safer, more effective practices across sectors.
“The goal of the book was to foster dialogue between scholars and practitioners,” says Chuang. “We wanted to create some conversation about how academics think about learning from failure, and also how practitioners think about it in practice.”
Recurring problems – from medical mistakes to airplane crashes – underscore the urgency of that dialogue. For Chuang, understanding failure is only part of the challenge; making sure it translates into meaningful change is the greater one. For him, the book – and his work as a whole – is about turning mistakes into opportunities for progress, rather than missed chances to learn.
“We want to create more awareness, from both academia and industry,” he says. “There is some awareness, but we still do not see people really learning from failure.”
That ongoing challenge continues to drive his research. Whether examining why individuals resist change, how organizations embed lessons, or how policies enable or block learning, Chuang remains motivated by a single pursuit: understanding what it takes for setbacks to become catalysts for progress.
“Failure is an important part of learning,” he says. “But understanding why that doesn’t always happen is what drives me.”