There is a library in Edinburgh, Scotland, called The Library of Mistakes. It aims to improve understanding about how and why economic models fail.
“In recent years financial education has focused on the power of the equation to explain economic and financial forces. This distillation of complex forces into faux objectivity has created dangerous errors in financial understanding.
That objectivity has only been attained with the use of assumptions which do not hold in the real world. The Library of Mistakes exists to allow students, professionals and members of the general public to study financial history to understand how finance has worked, rather than how it should work if key unrealistic assumptions are made.”
http://www.libraryofmistakes.com/about
A searchable library of mistakes, errors, and failures is a precious resource for all students of economics.
If only such a library existed for students of deception.
I have only ever encountered one openly published systematic review of deception failures. This was a report produced by Barton Whaley in 2010 for the US Foreign Denial & Deception Committee, entitled ‘When Deception Fails: The Theory Of Outs’. It presents a taxonomy of the causes of deceptive failure, illustrated with 60 examples of failure in military and intelligence deception operations. The report was later incorporated in Whaley’s posthumously published book, ‘Turnabout and Deception’ (2016, pp.IIi-II90).
Failed deception provides an incredible learning opportunity. It enables a postmortem study of the aetiology of failure. Analysing multiple failed cases enables the revelation of common causes and patterns of failure. And cutting the data in different ways can reveal how failure arises from the intersections between the target, environment, strategy, execution, and other factors. Of course, any analysis is only as good as the available historical case data, the analytical framework employed, and the skill and experience of the analyst.
Insights about the causes of failed deception enable enhanced target audience analysis (that could, for example, identify early warning signs of prospective failure), stronger deception planning processes, improved risk management, and better informed operational oversight and sign-off.
Given these benefits, it is surprising that there are not more published studies on deceptive failure. Do please let me know if you are aware of any others.
In 2017, the Library of Mistakes opened an international branch at FLAME University in Pune, India. And at present, the Edinburgh branch is closed in preparation for a significant expansion and reopening in Spring 2022.
Both activities suggest that there is success in failure!
References
Whaley, Barton. (2010). When Deception Fails: The Theory Of Outs. Washington, DC: Foreign Denial & Deception Committee. National Intelligence Center, Office of the Director of National Security.
Whaley, Barton. (2016). Turnabout and Deception: Crafting the Double-Cross and the Theory of Outs. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press.