Making the Team: A Guide for Managers

Conclusions

Teams make important decisions and some of them will not be good ones, despite the very best of intentions. It is unrealistic to suggest that poor decision making, or for that matter even disastrous decision making, is avoidable. The key message hearkens back to a point we made early in chapter 1, which has to do with creating an organization that can optimally learn from failure. Learning from failure is difficult when people suffer—especially innocent ones. As a case in point, consider the steps that were taken by NASA following the space shuttle Challenger accident, including the redesign of the joints and solid rocket booster, which went through hundreds of modifications; the institution of full hazard analysis for thousands of ...