Change at Last, but When Does Change Last? Preserving Attentional Engagement around Past Failures and Their Lessons

Although failures and other experiences can capture attention and motivate organizations to learn and improve, this knowledge is not always retained over time, leaving some organizations dangerously prone to repeat the same mistakes repeatedly. We adapt theory on the attention-based view—and specifically on attentional engagement and vigilance—to shed new light on this process. While prior research has examined how competing events may draw attention away, our theory leads us to consider the circumstances that will motivate employees to maintain attention on learning from failure that has already occurred. Our framework examines the conditions that preserve attention to past failures by increasing the perception that related issues exist elsewhere, serving as continuing reminders of or cues about the failure when attention begins to drift away. We find support for related hypotheses involving a failure’s complexity, the firm’s culpability, and the ongoing use of routines related to those involved in the failure. Our findings contribute to the attention-based view by developing theory about attentional engagement and vigilance and by emphasizing the conditions that can keep attention focused on, rather drawn away from, past failure. We also contribute to efforts to examine knowledge depreciation and forgetting in more depth in organizational learning theory.