This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book addresses how organizations can deal with human fallibility in order to create space for excellence at work. Some mistakes in work settings put lives at risk, while others create openings for innovative breakthroughs. In order to deal constructively with fallibility, an organization needs a communication climate where it is normal to voice opinions, admit mistakes, and ask for help in critical situations. The book builds on interviews with practitioners in healthcare, aviation, IT, public governance, and industry. It connects narratives from these fields with theories from organizational psychology and philosophy, as well as from positive organizational scholarship. In the final chapter, an overall ethics of fallibility at work is outlined. Fallibility at Work contributes to research in multiple academic disciplines, but also reaches out to practitioners who are interested in the connections between error and excellence in organizations.
This book addresses how organizations can deal with human fallibility in order to create space for excellence at work. Some mistakes in work settings put lives at risk, while others create openings for innovative breakthroughs. In order to deal constructively with fallibility, an organization needs a communication climate where it is normal to voice opinions, admit mistakes, and ask for help in critical situations. The book builds on interviews with practitioners in healthcare, aviation, IT, public governance, and industry. It connects narratives from these fields with theories from organizational psychology and philosophy, as well as from positive organizational scholarship. In the final chapter, an overall ethics of fallibility at work is outlined. Fallibility at Work contributes to research in multiple academic disciplines, but also reaches out to practitioners who are interested in the connections between error and excellence in organizations. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
A curious ambiguity surrounds errors in professional working contexts: they must be avoided in case they lead to adverse (and potentially disastrous) results, yet they also hold the key to improving our knowledge and procedures. In a further irony, it seems that a prerequisite for circumventing errors is our remaining open to their potential occurrence and learning from them when they do happen. This volume, the first to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives on learning from errors at work, presents theoretical concepts and empirical evidence in an attempt to establish under what conditions professionals deal with errors at work productively—in other words, learn the lessons they contain. By drawing upon and combining cognitive and action-oriented approaches to human error with theories of adult, professional, and workplace learning this book provides valuable insights which can be applied by workers and professionals. It includes systematic theoretical frameworks for explaining learning from errors in daily working life, methodologies and research instruments that facilitate the measurement of that learning, and empirical studies that investigate relevant determinants of learning from errors in different professions. Written by an international group of distinguished researchers from various disciplines, the chapters paint a comprehensive picture of the current state of the art in research on human fallibility and (learning from) errors at work.
Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. When can we trust what we believe—that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"—and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action.
Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter considers psychoanalysis from a fresh perspective: the therapist’s mortality—in at least two senses of the word. That the therapist can die, and is also fallible, can be seen as necessary or even defining components of the therapeutic process. At every moment, the analyst's vulnerability and human limitations underlie the work, something rarely openly acknowledged. Freud’s central insights continue to guide the range of all talking therapies, but they do so somewhat in the manner of a smudged ancestral map. That blur, or degree of confusion, invites new ways of reading. Ellen Pinsky reexamines fundamental principles underlying by-now-dusty terms such as "neutrality," "abstinence," "working through," and the peculiar expression "termination." Pinsky reconsiders—in some measure, hopes to restore—the most essential, humane, and useful components of the original psychoanalytic perspective, guided by the most productive threads in the discipline's still-evolving theory. Freud's most important contribution was arguably to discover (or invent) the psychoanalytic situation itself. This book reflects on central questions pertaining to that extraordinary discovery: What is the psychoanalytic situation? How does it work (and fail to work)? Why does it work? This book aims to articulate what is fundamental and what we can't do without—the psychoanalytic essence—while neither idealizing Freud nor devaluing his achievement. Historically, Freud has been misread, distorted, maligned or, at times, even dismissed. Pinsky reappraises his significance with respect to psychoanalytic writers who have extended, and amended, his thinking. Of particular interest are those psychoanalytic thinkers who, like Freud, are not only original thinkers but also great writers—including D. W. Winnicott and Hans Loewald. Covering a broad range of psychoanalytic paradigms, Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter will bring a fresh understanding of the nature, benefits and pitfalls of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and provide superb background and inspiration for anyone working across the entire range of talking therapies.
Fallible Man is the second book in Paul Ricoeur’s early trilogy on the will and the most accessible of his early writings. While the descriptive approach of Freedom and Nature set aside all normative questions, Fallible Man removes those brackets to examine the bad will, asking what makes evil a possibility. Combining rigor and originality, Ricoeur locates the possibility of evil in a self that is fundamentally in conflict with itself. Edited by Scott Davidson, A Companion to Ricoeur's Fallible Man clarifies and contextualizes the central arguments developed in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, providing insight into his formative influences and themes. The collection gathers an international group of scholars who specialize in Ricoeur’s thought to shed light on an impressive range of themes from Fallible Man that resonate with contemporary debates in philosophy and religion.
This book is open access under a CC-BY license. Moral dilemmas are a pervasive feature of working life. Moral Reasoning at Work offers a fresh perspective on how to live with them using ethics and moral psychology research. It argues that decision-makers must go beyond compliance and traditional approaches to ethics to prepare for moral dilemmas. The second edition has been updated with a range of examples from the author’s more recent research, to reflect current issues affecting organizations in the digital age. With two new chapters on artificial intelligence and social media, this new edition provides an up-to-date overview of ethical challenges in organizations.
Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. The Pardoner dares to assume official roles to which he has no legal claim and for which he is quite unsuited. We are faced with the shocking consequences of the belief, standard for the time, that immorality is not necessarily a bar to effective ministry. Even more subversively, the Wife of Bath, who represents one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, dispenses wisdom of the highest order. This innovative book places these "fallible authors" within the full intellectual context that gave them meaning. Alastair Minnis magisterially examines the impact of Aristotelian thought on preaching theory, the controversial practice of granting indulgences, religious and medical categorizations of deviant bodies, theological attempts to rationalize sex within marriage, Wycliffite doctrine that made authority dependent on individual grace and raised the specter of Donatism, and heretical speculation concerning the possibility of female teachers. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath are revealed as interconnected aspects of a single radical experiment wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.
After reflecting on his support of a losing Democrat for president, George Soros steps back to revisit his views on why George Bush's policies around the world fall short in the arenas most important to Soros: democracy, human rights and open society. As a survivor of the Holocaust and a life-long proponent of free expression, Soros understands the meaning of freedom. And yet his differences with George Bush, another proponent of freedom, are profound. In this powerful essay Soros spells out his views and how they differ from the president's. He reflects on why the Democrats may have lost the high ground on these values issues and how they might reclaim it. As he has in his recent books, On Globalization and The Bubble of American Supremacy , Soros uses facts, anecdotes, personal experience and philosophy to illuminate a major topic in a way that both enlightens and inspires.
A Cure for Poverty? This book provides a new explanation of why capitalism succeeds where it does, yet fails to achieve universal welfare as its most vocal proponents claim it ought to. By looking at the issue of the meta-knowledge problem--how disadvantaged people do not know how to find out what knowledge is valuable, where to acquire it, and how to finance it--the book discovers the core reason for enduring poverty of entire communities. The book starts with a core axiom that knowledge is fallible (and meta-knowledge even more so) and discusses the implications of that for ideas in welfare, education, entrepreneurship, banking, law, ethics and religion. In its Appendix, entitled "A Rationalist's Guide to Religion" the book provides an interpretation of the world's major faiths in light of the fallibility axiom.
