The study was conducted by Mahadih Kyambade of the Department of Leadership and Governance and Afulah Namatovu of the Department of Applied Computing and IT, both at Makerere University Business School in Kampala. Their starting point was a gap in the organizational learning literature: while the mechanics of learning from failure have been studied extensively in hospitals, hotels, and technology firms, higher education in developing countries has received comparatively little empirical attention. Universities, the authors argue, are precisely the kind of institutions where learning from failure should flourish, since inquiry and reflection are their core business, yet hierarchical cultures and competitive pressures can make failure something to conceal rather than examine.

To test their ideas, the researchers used a quantitative design, collecting structured survey data from 214 academic staff across three public universities in Uganda. The survey measured three constructs: the quality of workplace relationships, the degree of psychological safety respondents felt, and the extent to which staff reported openly analyzing and learning from failures. The analysis followed the mediation procedure introduced by Baron and Kenny in 1986, a classic statistical approach for testing whether a third variable explains the pathway between a cause and an effect. Regression diagnostics were used to check the data for problems such as collinearity before the models were estimated.

The concept of high-quality relationships at the heart of the study comes from positive organizational scholarship, particularly the work of Jane Dutton and colleagues. High-quality connections are characterized by mutual trust, respect, and energizing engagement; people in such relationships feel valued and are willing to invest in one another. Earlier research by Abraham Carmeli and Jody Gittell, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2009, showed that these relational capacities promote learning from failure in work organizations, partly by building psychological safety. The Ugandan study extends that framework into a new institutional and cultural setting, asking whether the same mechanism holds in resource-constrained public universities.

Psychological safety, the mediating variable in the study, is a construct popularized by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson in landmark papers from 1996 and 1999. It describes a shared belief that a team or workplace is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, that members can ask questions, admit mistakes, and raise concerns without fear of humiliation or punishment. Edmondson’s original fieldwork in hospital units found that teams with better climates actually reported more errors, not because they made more, but because they felt able to discuss them. The construct later gained global fame when Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the leading characteristic of its most effective teams, and it has since been studied in settings ranging from supply chains to software engineering.

The results of the Ugandan survey were clear on the first question. High-quality relationships significantly and positively predicted learning from failures among academic staff. In other words, respondents who reported trusting, respectful, and supportive connections with colleagues were more likely to say that they reflected on mistakes, discussed what went wrong, and adjusted their practice accordingly. This is consistent with social exchange theory, rooted in Peter Blau’s 1964 work, which holds that relationships built on reciprocity and goodwill generate obligations of openness and mutual support. When colleagues treat each other well, the theory predicts, they exchange not just favors but also the candid information that learning requires.

The second finding added nuance. Psychological safety partially mediated the relationship between high-quality connections and learning from failure. That means supportive relationships do their work partly by creating an environment in which staff feel safe to be vulnerable about their errors, but the relationships also appear to contribute through other channels, such as the practical help and diverse perspectives that good colleagues provide when dissecting a failure. Partial mediation is a common and informative pattern in this literature; it suggests that psychological safety is an important mechanism but not the only one, and that interventions targeting relationships and interventions targeting safety climate can each add value.

The practical implications for university leaders are significant. If learning from failure depends on trust, respect, and open communication, then leaders who want resilient, continuously improving institutions should invest in the relational fabric of their organizations, not merely in training programs or evaluation systems. That could mean modeling openness about their own missteps, responding to reported problems with curiosity rather than blame, and building inclusive climates where staff of all statuses feel their voices matter. Research on leader inclusiveness in health care by Ingrid Nembhard and Amy Edmondson has shown that such behaviors disproportionately help lower-status members speak up, suggesting that deliberate leadership attention can widen who participates in learning conversations.

The study also contributes to a growing body of work on psychological safety in African institutional contexts, including prior surveys in Ghana and South Africa and the authors’ own earlier research on socially responsible leadership, job engagement, and innovative work behavior in Ugandan universities. Higher education across much of the continent faces intense pressures, from surging enrollment to constrained budgets, and Mushemeza’s 2016 review documented the challenges academic staff confront. In such environments, the capacity to learn from failure may be a decisive ingredient of institutional adaptation, and the finding that everyday relationship quality matters offers a comparatively low-cost lever for change.

Like all survey-based research, the study has limits that the authors and readers should keep in view. The data are cross-sectional and self-reported, so the findings capture associations and a theoretically grounded mediation pathway rather than definitive proof of causation, and common-method bias cannot be entirely excluded. The sample of 214 staff across three public universities is respectable but specific to one national context. Still, the convergence of these results with a broad international literature, from hospital units to flight decks, strengthens the case that the pattern is general: organizations learn from failure when their people are connected well enough, and feel safe enough, to talk honestly about what went wrong. For universities hoping to turn setbacks into improvement, the message is that the soft stuff of relationships and psychological safety is, in fact, the hard currency of learning.

Subject of Research: The influence of high-quality workplace relationships on learning from failure among university academic staff, mediated by psychological safety.

Article Title: Learning from failure is essential in university context: how high-quality relationships influence learning from failures via the lens of psychological safety

Article References: Kyambade, M., & Namatovu, A. (2026). Learning from failure is essential in university context: how high-quality relationships influence learning from failures via the lens of psychological safety. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 482. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01778-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01778-x

Keywords: psychological safety, learning from failure, high-quality relationships, organizational learning, higher education, Uganda, public universities, academic staff, mediation analysis, social exchange theory, workplace trust, Learning

The study was conducted as the second, qualitative phase of a sequential explanatory mixed-methods project. Twenty-one experts were recruited through snowball sampling from eleven Type I medical universities, the highest tier of Iran’s medical education system. The participant pool deliberately spanned the organizational hierarchy: faculty members who produce research, senior administrators who allocate resources and set strategy, and knowledge translation specialists who sit at the interface between the two worlds. Between February and August 2023, the researchers conducted semistructured interviews lasting between forty-five and ninety minutes, allowing participants to describe in their own words what helps and what hinders the movement of evidence into policy and practice within their institutions.

Analysis followed the inductive content analysis framework of Elo and Kyngäs, proceeding through open coding, categorization, and abstraction with the qualitative analysis software ATLAS.ti. Rigor was addressed through several established safeguards: member checking, in which participants reviewed the researchers’ interpretations; peer debriefing among the analytic team; and audit trails documenting how codes and categories evolved. Inter-coder reliability was quantified using Cohen’s Kappa, reaching a value of 0.82, which is conventionally interpreted as almost perfect agreement between independent coders. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with ethics approval from the Kerman University of Medical Sciences Ethics Committee and written informed consent from all participants.

From this analysis, five overarching dimensions of organizational readiness for knowledge translation emerged. The first is organizational culture and research climate, encompassing the norms, values, and informal expectations that determine whether evidence is genuinely valued or merely tolerated. The second is human resource development and training, the formal and informal structures through which staff acquire the skills to find, appraise, summarize, and communicate research findings. The third is knowledge production and sharing, the pipelines through which new evidence is generated, stored, and circulated inside and beyond the institution. The fourth is evidence-based policy and strategy, the extent to which institutional decision-making processes are explicitly designed around research findings. The fifth, and for the authors the most consequential, is monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, the systems that track whether knowledge translation efforts are actually functioning.

What elevates this study beyond a conventional checklist of readiness factors is its second-order analysis of how these five dimensions relate to one another. Rather than treating monitoring and evaluation as the final step of an implementation sequence, the researchers found that feedback loops function as the connective tissue of the entire system. In their formulation, feedback mechanisms act as the nervous system of knowledge translation readiness, continuously sensing what is happening across culture, training, production, and policy, and transmitting signals that allow the organization to learn and adapt. Without those loops, the other four dimensions operate in isolation; with them, the organization develops the dynamic capacity to correct course, reinforce what works, and abandon what does not.

This reframing carries real theoretical weight. Many existing knowledge translation frameworks, inherited from linear models of research uptake, position monitoring as a subsequent and largely administrative stage that occurs after the substantive work of translation is complete. The Iranian findings invert that logic: the feedback apparatus is not downstream of implementation but upstream of it, because organizations that cannot perceive the consequences of their own actions cannot become ready for anything. In systems terms, feedback converts a static bundle of resources into a learning system, and it is precisely that learning capacity, the authors argue, that distinguishes institutions where evidence routinely shapes decisions from institutions where reports accumulate unread.

The expert interviews also yielded a sobering catalogue of the barriers currently undermining this capacity in Iranian medical universities. Participants described siloed communication, in which departments, faculties, and administrative units exchange information poorly or not at all, fragmenting the very loops that the readiness model depends upon. They reported limited incentives for the use of evidence, meaning that career advancement, recognition, and reward structures do not encourage either researchers to engage with practice or managers to engage with research. They cited a lack of managerial commitment, insufficient capacity-building structures for developing the specialized skills that knowledge translation demands, and weak linkages between research units and the practice environments, such as hospitals and public health programs, that the evidence is meant to inform.

The authors conclude that enhancing organizational readiness for knowledge translation in this setting requires a multifaceted approach that strengthens cultural, structural, and leadership capacities simultaneously, rather than addressing any single factor in isolation. Most pointedly, they argue that establishing structured feedback mechanisms must be viewed as the core driver, not an afterthought, of sustainable knowledge translation implementation. In practical terms, that would mean designing deliberate channels through which evidence use is observed, questioned, and evaluated: routine forums where researchers and decision-makers exchange information, evaluation systems that generate usable information about how evidence flows, and leadership practices that treat feedback as a resource rather than a threat.

The study’s authors are careful to specify the limits of their claims. The findings identify enabling conditions for knowledge translation rather than providing direct evidence that strengthening these conditions improves health outcomes, a distinction that matters for anyone tempted to treat the five-dimension model as a guaranteed prescription. The research is also confined to Type I medical universities in one national context, and organizational readiness in smaller institutions or different health systems may depend on a different balance of factors. Nevertheless, the implications travel beyond Iran. Knowledge translation challenges are well documented across low- and middle-income countries, where research production has often expanded faster than the organizational machinery needed to apply it. By proposing feedback as the organizing principle of readiness, the study offers a testable hypothesis for implementation science: that the first question any research institution should ask is not how much evidence it produces, but how effectively it hears the signal of its own experience. By addressing these readiness factors, the authors suggest, medical universities can strengthen their role in evidence-informed policy and practice, turning the institutional pyramid of training, production, and strategy into a genuinely self-correcting system.

Subject of Research: Organizational readiness for knowledge translation and feedback loops in Iranian medical universities

Article Title: Feedback loops as a core driver: rethinking organizational readiness for knowledge translation in Iranian medical universities

Article References: Rezaei, F., Saberian, M., Ghasemi, S., Gharibi, Z., & Hosseinzadeh, H. (2026). Feedback loops as a core driver: rethinking organizational readiness for knowledge translation in Iranian medical universities. Health Research Policy and Systems. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01537-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01537-7

Keywords: knowledge translation, organizational readiness, feedback loops, implementation science, medical universities, Iran, qualitative study, evidence-based policy, monitoring and evaluation, organizational learning, health policy, Feedback

The article, authored by a team spanning Harvard Kennedy School, New America, Minnesota Management and Budget and ESADE Business School, introduces a unified framework built on three sequential questions. Is the evidence useful, meaning does it speak to a problem policymakers actually face? Is it usable, meaning can decision-makers realistically interpret and act on it within their institutional constraints? And is it used, meaning does it ultimately change what governments do? The authors contend that a substantial production–adoption gap has opened because researchers and funders have concentrated overwhelmingly on the first stage, producing more and better studies, while paying far less systematic attention to the second and third stages where most evidence quietly dies.

The scale of the problem is striking when laid out in the literature the authors synthesize. Implementation science has estimated that it takes an average of seventeen years for research evidence to change clinical practice, and there is little reason to believe policy moves faster. Systematic reviews of barriers to evidence use among policymakers consistently identify the same culprits: poor timeliness, irrelevant framing, lack of trust, and absence of intermediaries who can translate findings into actionable recommendations. Meanwhile, surveys of civil servants in the United States and Australia reveal that many public employees have never encountered the evidence base relevant to their portfolios, and that those who have often lack the statistical training to interpret it.

One of the most provocative threads in the new framework concerns the psychology of the people on the receiving end. Policymakers, like everyone else, are boundedly rational and susceptible to motivated reasoning. Experimental work shows that politicians often update their beliefs selectively, discounting evidence that threatens their ideological commitments, and that they appear more resistant to debiasing interventions than the general public. Field experiments with local officials across multiple countries have tested whether presenting impact estimates changes behaviour, with mixed results. The authors argue that this growing body of behavioural evidence on evidence reception remains fragmented across political science, economics and psychology, and that integrating it is essential to understanding why even high-quality, well-communicated findings go unused.

The framework also draws attention to the supply side of the problem: the characteristics of the evidence itself. Credibility matters, a finding that stretches back decades in communication research, but so do practical attributes such as cost, feasibility and the political palatability of the intervention being tested. Conjoint experiments with US state government officials suggest that decision-makers weigh implementation difficulty and price alongside effect sizes, sometimes favouring a less effective but easier-to-run programme over a more effective but operationally demanding one. Studies of policy diffusion show that effectiveness information travels unevenly across jurisdictions, and that ideological alignment between the source of evidence and the adopting government can matter as much as the underlying results, a pattern documented in recent work on evidence-based policy adoption.

Intermediary organizations occupy a central place in the agenda. The United Kingdom’s What Works Centres, evidence clearinghouses in the United States, and a growing ecosystem of knowledge brokers all exist to bridge the production–adoption gap, yet the authors note that scholarship on these intermediaries is surprisingly thin. Are they neutral boundary organizations or politically savvy policy entrepreneurs? Which brokering strategies, skills and organizational forms actually increase uptake? Large-scale studies using tools such as Altmetric and Overton to trace the societal impact of policy research are beginning to provide answers, and the authors highlight emerging work on AI-augmented clearinghouses and large language models for evidence synthesis as potentially transformative, if unproven, technologies for making evidence cheaper to find and digest.

Scaling presents another underexplored bottleneck. A randomized evaluation conducted in one context may not transport to another, and formal work on the transportability of experimental results remains largely confined to technical journals. Evidence from two prominent government nudge units suggests that effect sizes observed in academic settings often shrink when interventions are deployed at administrative scale, and megastudies involving hundreds of thousands of participants have revealed substantial heterogeneity in what works. The authors argue that the field lacks a systematic understanding of when and why findings generalize, and that policymakers’ justified scepticism about external validity is rarely treated as a researchable question in its own right rather than an obstacle to be overcome with better messaging.

Organizational learning offers the final pillar of the framework. Governments are not individual decision-makers but complex bureaucracies with routines, incentives, capacities and cultures that shape whether information is absorbed. Research on organizational learning, drawn heavily from the private sector, suggests that learning requires deliberate structures: feedback loops, protected time for reflection, and leadership that rewards experimentation. Public sector studies indicate that involvement in performance management routines can increase the use of performance information, but that public managers may be more risk-averse than private counterparts, and that status quo bias systematically dampens appetite for reform. The authors call for research that treats evidence adoption as an organizational capability to be built, not merely a message to be delivered.

What emerges from the synthesis is a concrete research agenda rather than a lament. The authors identify gaps at every stage: we know little about how policymakers search for evidence in the first place, how they trade off competing studies, how intermediary organizations should be designed, how to predict transportability, and how organizational contexts amplify or suppress uptake. They argue that closing these gaps is not an academic luxury. Billions of dollars in social spending ride on decisions made with thin or stale evidence, and the promise of the evidence-based policymaking movement, improving societal outcomes through better decisions, cannot be kept if the last mile between journal and legislation remains unmapped. The Perspective, which grew out of collaboration between academics and practitioners inside government, models the kind of co-production it recommends: research questions shaped by the people who must actually use the answers.

Subject of Research: A research agenda for closing the gap between the production of policy-relevant research and its adoption in government policymaking.

Article Title: A research agenda for making evidence useful, usable and used in policymaking

Article References: A research agenda for making evidence useful, usable and used in policymaking. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02593-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02593-3

Keywords: evidence-based policymaking, Nature Human Behaviour, production-adoption gap, behavioural public policy, knowledge brokers, organizational learning, policy diffusion, implementation science, What Works Centres, randomized evaluations, policymaker decision-making, research translation