Framing Catastrophic Failure as a Learning Opportunity

In recent times, failure has been hailed as a valuable trigger to organizational learning. This is especially true in organizations pursuing radical innovation that address humanity’s grand challenges. For organizations to be able to learn, however, both the organization and its stakeholders must frame failure as a learning instance. By examining an extreme case, we explore how an organization makes strategic use of traditional and social media to influence stakeholders’ meaning-making process in the aftermath of highly visible catastrophic failure. We identify two sets of complementary strategies: Amplifying/Retrenching and Grounding/Elevating. The organization used these strategies to regulate the frequency and type of content it made available to stakeholders. We theorize that the intimacy provided by social media and the formality of established news outlets may, together, contribute to influencing stakeholders to see failure in positive terms and maintain their support.