Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a better result might be called practice, perseverance, persistence, even patience; it might also be called futility or even madness.
We know that sometimes persistence pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t, so how do we know which is which?
Very often this problem is disguised – for example when we want a better outcome of a process. It is easy to assign blame for poor outcomes to people because of the cause-and-effect chain that you can trace back from an obvious mistake – but it is always valid to do this?
Suppose I repeat the same actions and occasionally get a poor outcome – checking for the mistake and when it happens tracing the audit trail back to the action of a specific person is of little value in this case because it doesn’t expose the true root cause.
Outcomes are usually the result of cumulative actions and it is difficult or impossible to separate out the contributions.
So, the only rational way to improve outcome is to improve every part of the process proactively. And if there is a bad apple in the barrel it is much easier to spot when the rest of the apples are good than when all the apples are a bit bruised.