Organisational Crisis-Preparedness: The Importance of Learning from Failures

Organisational crises are relatively low-probability, high-impact situations that threaten the competitiveness and viability of an organisation. As such, a key managerial challenge is to design and implement an organisational system that is capable of coping with these traumatic events. The results of this study indicate that learning from failures is an important facilitator of preparedness for both present and prospective crises. Although crisis experience and an industry's technological risk were not significantly related to crisis-preparedness, high-performing organisations reported higher levels of crisis-preparedness. We discuss how these findings may help managers to prepare their organisations more effectively for crisis situations.