The course will provide students with an overview on how organizations are impacted by errors. In business the focus is often on learning from success cases. While failures also provide valuable information they are often not systematically evaluated as they tend to be associated with neglect or sloppy work and are therefore not openly communicated. Silence on errors - which is an underestimated phenomenon in many organizations - may furthermore prevent breaking error chains and leading to big loss events or even catastrophic failures. The course will make students aware of the hurdles that prevent organizations from having an open error communication and introduce them to the concepts developed by high-reliability organizations as airlines, hospitals or nuclear power plants to effectively deal with errors. At the end of the course the students can practice their acquired learning in an engaging group simulation. Most of the case studies used in this course as well as the simulation have been authored and developed by the teaching professor.

Faculty: Jan U. Hagen

Course Date & Time

First six dates are Thursdays (January 9, 16, 23, 30, February 6 & 20) and last three dates are Tuesdays (Feb 25, March 6 & 11); session times are always 2:00pm-4:15pm CET, exception is the session on March 6 (2:00pm - 5:30pm)