2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

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.

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.