Learning from major failures and crisis experiences is essential for creating robust, safe, and reliable organizations and societies as well as for preventing a repeat of the crisis. Hence, it is of great importance to increase knowledge about why some individuals and organizations learn from crisis experiences and others do not. Studying how organizations learn from crisis episodes raises a number of issues pertaining to the difficulties of applying the concept of organizational learning empirically. This article discusses the problems of defining, disaggregating, and categorizing the organizational learning concept along with the effects of timing on organizational learning and why we should expect that crises are stimulants to learning in the first place. The concluding section presents an empirical application of the organizational learning concept that acknowledges the learning cycle as a fourfold process involving knowledge gathering, acting on knowledge, knowledge dissemination, and maintaining/reconsidering knowledge.