SUCCESS, FAILURE AND THE GRAY ZONE: HOW ORGANIZATIONS LEARN OR DON'T FROM AMBIGUOUS EXPERIENCE.

A long standing body of work emphasizes that organizations learn from experience by transforming continuous measures of performance into dichotomous outcomes of success and failure. This dichotomy creates a simple heuristic for prescribing behavior: persist when succeeding, change when failing. At the same time an emerging stream of research on mindfulness has started to focus on how organizations learn (or don't) from ambiguous and heterogeneous experience. I connect these literatures arguing that conventional models of organizational learning do not consider how organizations learn (or don't) from outcomes that fall between success and failure.