Failure is often better for success in the long run

Researchers have found that people and organisations that disastrously miss their goals perform much better in the long run.

That is because they gain more knowledge from their failures than their successes and the lessons are more likely to stay with them.

Professor Vinit Desai, who led the study at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, said success may be sweeter but that failure was a far better teacher.

"We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting while knowledge from failure stuck around for years," he said.

"But there is a tendency in organisations to ignore failure or try not to focus on it.

"Managers may fire people or turn over the entire workforce while they should be treating the failure as a learning opportunity."

He based his research on companies and organisations that launch satellites, rockets and shuttles into space – an arena where failures are high profile and hard to conceal.

The researchers said they discovered little "significant organisational learning from success".

Prof Desai compared the flights of the space shuttle Atlantis and the Challenger.

During the 2002 Atlantis flight, a piece of insulation broke off and damaged the left solid rocket booster but did not impede the mission or the programme.

Read more at The Telegraph