2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

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.

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.