The ability of permanent, project-intensive organizations to learn from projects has been questioned. Clearly this topic is important because of the growing importance of projects in industrial activity. In this paper concepts of learning are extended to the special case where individuals must deal with crises in projects. An ethnographic study of field construction projects produced 13 examples of crises during a total of 10 weeks of onsite observations for each project in the sample. From these examples, four of different types are described and the learning from them is discussed in this paper.