2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

Repeat events can erode workforce culture and reduce innovation through the lack of understanding on why the event recurs.  This normalizes risk to the crew who are generally outcome focused rather than process focused.  Partnering with the crew and developing changes to the process WITH them is the key to produce effective change and reduce or prevent reoccurrence of unwanted events.  This presentation will discuss how we got here, and the effort required to improve our process to reduce and mitigate future risk.

What if the early warning signs of an unwanted event were always there and we’re the reason they go unnoticed?
In the animal kingdom, survival often depends on the ability to change perspective. A chameleon doesn’t just blend into its environment, it actively adjusts how it sees, focuses, and responds to changing conditions. In our workplaces, however, familiarity can dull perception. Over time, “routine work” becomes unnoticed, allowing risks and opportunities alike to hide in plain sight.

This engaging, interactive session invites participants from all roles to deliberately shift how they observe normal work, the everyday routines, adaptations, and decisions that keep operations running. Grounded in Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) principles, the session moves beyond incident-driven learning to explore how we can learn from successful work.

Participants will leave with eight practical strategies to sharpen observation skills, helping them notice subtle changes, hidden hazards, and system signals that are often overlooked. These tools can be applied immediately to strengthen learning, improve communication across roles, and turn everyday work experiences into meaningful, proactive improvements - no matter where you work or what you do.

If you only learn from accidents, you’re already too late.
 
Every day, people prevent harm by noticing something feels off, speaking up, or changing the plan at the last second. These moments—close calls—are rich with insight, yet they often vanish without a trace. Close Call Mining is the deliberate practice of finding and learning from those moments before luck runs out.
 
This talk challenges the belief that “nothing happened” means “nothing to learn.” You’ll learn how to surface close call stories that matter, support workers in recognizing early warning signs, and ask better questions that reveal risk while there’s still time to act.
 
Because the most powerful learning happens before someone gets hurt.

High Reliability Organizations (HROs) all share one unique trait. They're Resilient. Simply put, "The hallmark of an HRO is not that it is error-free, but that errors do not disable it." So HOW do they do this? Join us in this fast-paced presentation to explore the basics of nine (9) practical methods used by: paratroopers, firefighters, pilots, nurses and other experts in high-hazard industries. Examples include: embedding fail-safes, compartmentalizing to prevent cascades, using 4-layer decision-making,  and watching for "weak signals." -- Includes summary PDF handout.  


For more details, see, Chapter 7 "Build Resilience" in my new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Practical-Steps-Reliability-Technical/dp/B0FP99Z41N

The Art and Science of Decision-Making; The attention on our team members and their decisions seems to be greater today than in many years past. The demand to make “the right” decision is the loud voice right now and yet is tragically misguided in so many ways. Human interactions under stress will never yield a perfect right or wrong outcome. Trainers, leaders, attorneys and all involved in the process of preparing and evaluating  events need to understand what actually takes place and contributes to decisions under stress. This session will break apart the science we know today on decision making and how working the “art” of assisting that process may eventually lead to more ideal outcomes where possible.  We will frame this discussion from the lens of the police world but relate it to any of our industries where there are real stakes whether they are financial, product or people.

Traditional occupational health systems often emphasize compliance, reactive metrics, and error prevention. This session will explore the adoption and integration of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) operational learning tools like: Proactive Reporting, Leadership Walk & Talks and Learning Teams to drive organizational culture and operational excellence. Attendees will gain new insights into practical strategies for piloting these tools across diverse organizational settings to open proactive mindsets around safety performance, regulatory compliance, and continuous improvement.

Introduction to Recurrence Scoring


Objective: To introduce a standardized, dynamic recurrence scoring system for action plans, designed to improve risk assessment and management. This system aims to provide a clear, quantifiable measure of residual risk based on the effectiveness of implemented corrective and preventative actions.


Key Concepts:
I.    Initial Recurrence Score: A baseline risk value tied to the significance of an issue.
a.    Definition: The initial recurrence score reflects the inherent risk level of an issue before any mitigating actions are taken. It is directly linked to the Significance Level (SL) assigned to an issue.
II.    Residual Recurrence Score: A quantifiable measure of remaining risk after the implementation of preventative actions. This score is dynamic and reflects the impact of actions over time.
a.    Applicability: The residual score applies only to issues where a cause analysis has been conducted and preventative actions are subsequently identified. Issues with only trend codes will not have a residual recurrence score.
III.    Preventative Actions: The focus of this scoring mechanism, aiming to prevent reoccurrence.
a.    Action Score Definition: The score assigned to an action should be a percentage of the initial recurrence score. For each action, the default score will be the lower end of its category's range. The Issue Owner will have a slider to adjust this action-specific score within the defined range for its category.


Conclusion
This recurrence scoring framework provides a robust and transparent method for assessing and managing recurring risks. By quantifying risk, allowing for expert modification, and visually representing progress, it will significantly enhance decision-making and accountability within action plan management.

We know that Organizations are “data-driven,” yet safety and HOP are frequently reduced to lagging indicators or fragmented sets of leading metrics that struggle to influence real decisions.


This is where Microsoft Power BI can serve as a powerful translator.


Power BI (Business Intelligence) enables safety and HOP practitioners to integrate large volumes of disconnected, messy data and transform them into meaningful information that supports leadership decision-making. When the language of leadership is data, Power BI helps translate the realities of work into insights leaders can see, explore, and act upon. This helps us escape the over simplified binary world of red and green indicators. 


In this session, participants will explore how Power BI can be used to visualize and connect key HOP concepts, including rapidly degrading margins, SIF conditions, system drift, variability from plan (work-as-done vs. work-as-imagined), learning signals, and energy control effectiveness. Many organizations already collect the data needed to support this kind of analysis; the challenge is making it visible and useful.


Attendees will be introduced to practical learning pathways for Power BI, examples of AI-assisted development, and prototype data models (star schemas) specifically designed to support HOP and safety sensemaking. The session will focus on connecting and visualizing information that you already have to improve forecasting and decision quality.

When it comes to Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) and those initiatives and programs built around it, the problem is that there are many competing ideas, and most people think it’s got to be one or the other. 
This often leads to “new program” fatigue and disillusionment, which greatly undermines a Safety Professional’s influence. 
I intend to demonstrate how I have methodically built a thriving Human and Organizational (HOP) safety culture into one of the most difficult industries for such a thing, The Utility Line Clearance industry. 
I will lay out how I linked ten existing and newly created safety initiatives / pillars to beat the new program fatigue and disillusionment. 
We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of the initiatives and how to reinforce the weakness and get maximum leverage from the strengths.
When it comes to the ideas of differing approaches, I say - if it works, it works.

Understanding normal work is essential for advancing safety performance and operational excellence. In 2023, our organization launched the Useful Questions Program, designed to foster richer, more meaningful conversations before, during and after work execution. This effort led to the development of the Useful Questions Pocket Card in October 2023, providing frontline teams with quick, accessible prompts to encourage reflection, learning, and proactive risk awareness.
The Useful Questions program spread organically across worksites and management forums, teams adapted and refined the questions to fit their specific operational contexts, demonstrating the initiative’s flexibility, value, and cultural resonance. Building on its success, these questions were later embedded directly into our HSSEQ reporting card, enabling systematic capture of practical insights from everyday work.
We are now entering the next phase by leveraging artificial intelligence to analyze the growing body of collected insights. In collaboration with Google, we are developing AI-driven capabilities to identify trends, highlight recurring themes, and uncover latent signals from normal work. This integration will enable learning at a scale previously unattainable, strengthening our ability to anticipate emerging risks, support frontline teams, and continuously improve safety and operational resilience.
This presentation explores the program’s evolution, its impact on learning from normal work, and how AI-driven analytics will transform the way we understand and support the work that people do every day.