Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy.

Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.

Julianne G. Mahler is an associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

Maureen Hogan Casamayou is a former research fellow and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and she has taught at Georgetown University, Mount Vernon College, and George Mason University.

Preface

Part 1: Recognizing the Value of Organizational Learning1. Uncanny Similarities: The Challenger and Columbia Accidents2. Identifying Organizational LearningPart 2. Analyzing the Causes of the Shuttle Accidents 3. Structures for Processing Information4. Contractor Relations5. Political and Budgetary Pressures6. Organizational Culture

Part 3: Institutionalizing Lessons about Public Organizational Learning7. The Challenges of Learning in Public Organizations8. Lessons from NASA about Organizational Learning

References

Index