A nice article on HBR - "Why Organizations Don't Learn" , by Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats ; take a look. They list these reasons: Fear of failure Fixed mindset Over reliance on past performance Attribution bias The authors then give some strategies for overcoming these reasons for the lack of learning. Many of these will be familiar to the agile community. Who else has studied organization failure? Well I've heard that many academics have studied the failure modes of organizations. One was John Kotter's 8 Steps model developed by studying the failure modes of organizations trying to institute large scale changes. Other's have studied how successful large mergers have been after the fact (some would suggest it's on the order of 20% successful). Some have studied how successful large software development project have been (Chaos Report - it is not a good report). So what does your leader do to encourage learning at the or...