Towards a Theory of Negative Knowledge (NK): Almost-Mistakes as Drivers of Episodic Memory Amplification

This contribution offers a new view on how negative knowledge emerges from the experience of mistakes in firms and factories. In general, negative knowledge relates to the episodic memory, which means to incidents that are in their consequences negative and must be prevented in the future. In a couple of new studies, we can, on the one hand, show that there is a positive correlation between the quality of a culture of mistakes in firms and self-efficacy-belief, performance-motivation, and self-concept by male apprentices (but not by women). On the other hand, we would like to introduce the concept of almost-mistakes which elicits the issue of not really making the respective error, but being afraid and indignant at the moment at which it could have happened. This new idea must, of course, be differentiated by the importance of the respective action and situation on the one hand, and on the other hand to the social embeddedness of a person to whom the almost-mistake could have occurred. To prevent a substantial mistake that “nearly” could have happened, there is usually someone outside who helps in the last moment to hinder the act that would have been followed by the mistake. This person plays an important role because he/she reacts on the basis of their own memory of mistakes, which means their own negative knowledge and their respective meta-cognitive regulation. The mistake is an important, until now unseen but mostly impressive, motor for building up negative knowledge. After a couple of studies on the influence of a culture of mistakes in firms, we now begin to see how much negative knowledge helps to structure innovative firm behavior and the respective learning potential, but also how the concept of a culture of mistakes itself must be modified from the point of view of almost-mistakes.