When we lived in Arizona, my wife was stung by a scorpion. It was a bark scorpion, a small critter with venom that packs a wallop. The pain scorpions inflict is inversely proportional to their size. It’s the only species of scorpion whose venom can be lethal.

We only saw two scorpions in the eight years we lived in Arizona, which was cause for some celebration. I know people who moved into houses on “The Scorpion Trail,” migratory paths that weren’t altered just because someone decided to plop a house in the way. For those people, seeing scorpions was a daily trauma.

It’s a fact of desert life that just about every living thing out there is designed to sting, bite or prick you. From the tiny bark scorpions to cactus to the thorns of sweet acacia trees — the flora and fauna of the desert are evolutionary examples of “the best defense is a good offense.”

When my wife got stung, she called the Poison Control Center in Phoenix, and was connected with Jason, our scorpion sting answer man. He called back every couple of hours to check in on her. They have a wealth of operating experience to share on what to do when scorpions attack. (Okay, maybe that was a little melodramatic. Scorpions don’t really attack — but something about scorpions calls for hyperbole.)

After such an experience, it’s natural to want to learn from the event — but it’s important to learn the right lesson.

As Mark Twain once observed:

One example of learning the right lesson from our scorpion operating experience was that I started wearing shoes around the house, especially at night since our pointy-tailed arthropod friends are nocturnal.

But like the overly wary cat in Mark Twain’s quote, I was spotting imaginary scorpions everywhere in the mottled-brown pattern of our tile floors after my wife's scorpion sting. I was convinced the house was infested with scorpions. So I got out my trusty black light flashlights (one in each hand) and went scorpion hunting. Since scorpions literally glow in the dark, the title company gives you black light flashlights when you close on a house in Phoenix. (I made up that last part.)

I prowled through every dark room with my flashlights feeling a little like Dexter looking for blood spatter. I even shined the lights underneath tables and chairs because — if I haven’t instilled a morbid fear of scorpions yet, add this to the mix — bark scorpions can climb walls and hang upside down.

The result of my scorpion search? Zilch. The only one I saw was the dead scorpion my wife had whacked with her shoe after getting stung. And under the black light, it shined like a full moon.

The reason I am such a strong advocate for sharing and learning from operating experience is that my entire career has been devoted to the nuclear industry where the sharing of operating experience is truly unprecedented within corporate America. Electric utilities that guard their intellectual property fiercely in other areas share their nuclear operating experience openly. It has a lot to do with the fact that mistakes at one nuclear plant affect all the others — that we are, in essence, hostages of each other.

Another field where the sharing of operating experience could have a major positive impact is within the medical community. But the fear of litigation is so strong that medical professionals are reluctant to openly share their mistakes and near misses. And that’s why human error is still unacceptably high in our hospitals as discussed in Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, a disturbingly frank book written by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

But even when operating experience is shared, it’s difficult to get people to heed the message. Dr. Zack T. Pate, a former boss of mine who was chairman emeritus of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and the World Association of Nuclear Operators, had this to say about the difficulty of getting people to truly learn from operating experience:

Here's one final learning from our scorpion experience. No pesticide can deter them. In fact, scorpions — along with cockroaches — were found to survive nuclear test blasts. So the best way to keep them at bay is to eliminate their food source — crickets.

We got the Terminix guy out the next day.