2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

All Speakers, please check in with the Tech team upon arrival or at least the day before you are scheduled to present.

Conference Presentations: Please bring your actual presentation to the conference on a USB DRIVE (PowerPoint or whatever) and connect with the Tech's upon arrival so that we can assure EVERYTHING RUNS CORRECTLY on our computers and your AV needs are met.

This is a critical step to assure our conference program is executed flawlessly.

To arrange a meet-up, stop by the registration desk.

Assorted Breakfast Pastries, Whole Fresh Fruit, Scrambled Eggs, Bacon, Breakfast Potatoes, yogurt parfaits, frittata, steel cut oatmeal with toppings, pancakes with toppings 

RaDonda Vaught was the subject of one of the highest profile healthcare criminal cases in recent years.  She holds a BSN and a Certificate in Leadership from Western Kentucky University. While working as a BSN prepared registered nurse, Mrs. Vaught committed a medication error that ended the life of a patient in 2017.  


She was charged under administrative law by the Tennessee Department of Health, leading to the revocation of her nursing license by the Tennessee Board of Nursing in a July 2021 hearing.  Additionally, she was charged under criminal law and found guilty by jury trial of two felony charges in March of 2022: Negligent Homicide, and Abuse of an Impaired Adult, with placement on an Elder Abuse registry in the state of Tennessee. 


Mrs. Vaught is uniquely qualified to speak first hand on the impact this sentinel event has had on her life and her profession, along with the implications of the legal actions that followed.  A passionate advocate for safety and improvement, her story will be one that is not easily forgotten. 

Theories are boring. Facts lack dimension. Rules distance people.  Stories, on the other hand, are one of the most powerful ways to describe nuance, invite curiosity, build interest and change behavior. This presentation will examine the power of the story, the oldest tool of influence in human history, in the quest to improve safety, and illustrate how common themes of children’s bedtime stories can explain the transition from traditional to modern approaches of safety improvement.

In October 2024, I underwent a heart transplant after a long and complex battle with heart failure. What no one expected was what came next: when my heart was removed, surgeons discovered a large, cancerous sarcoma — a one‑in‑ten‑million finding that had gone undetected through years of testing, procedures, and clinical assumptions. This presentation uses my medical journey as a real‑world case study in how deeply held paradigms can shape — and sometimes limit — human judgment, even among highly skilled professionals.
For two years, I was treated for Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD), a condition expected to heal in months. Despite ten heart attacks, bypass surgery, and mounting evidence that the diagnosis didn’t fit, the paradigm held. My experience illustrates how cognitive anchors, organizational norms, and diagnostic momentum can prevent teams from seeing emerging information clearly. These same dynamics appear in every industry: when people lock onto a narrative, contradictory signals are often minimized or missed.
Through this deeply personal story, participants will explore how to recognize paradigm traps, create space for dissenting data, and build cultures where learning from anomalies is not just encouraged but expected. The session also highlights the profound gift of organ donation — the reason I am here to share this journey — and invites attendees to consider the life‑changing impact donors make.
Attendees will leave with renewed insight into how human beings interpret information, how organizations can better support adaptive thinking, and how embracing uncertainty can lead to better decisions, better outcomes, and, sometimes, a second chance at life.

Ceasar salad, Family style assorted flatbread margherita and peperoni flatbread, penne pasta, balsamic roasted vegetables, grilled herb chicken, cannoli sugar cookies, tiramisu, coffee and teas 

Preventing serious injuries and fatalities demands more than compliance—it requires shared learning, courageous dialogue, and a committed community of practice. Now entering its tenth year, the Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) Roundtable has brought together practitioners and senior leaders from diverse sectors including Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Heavy Industry, Construction, Healthcare, and Manufacturing to advance thought leadership and practical solutions for SIF prevention.  Our goal of offering the SIF Roundtable at this year’s CHOLearning conference is to build on the legacy of the SIF Roundtable and expand its reach to a new group committed to the same goal.

At Davey, we are constantly striving to build an organization comprised of more resilient systems through operationalizing Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) principles and ideas. One way Davey has started Operationalizing HOP is through Field Studies. Field Studies are frontline surveys/interviews conducted by our Health and Safety Team to use field knowledge, expertise, and success to guide our solution creation process around known serious injury and fatality hazards in our work. Our most recent field study is currently being used to strategize Davey’s 2026 approach to reduce falls from height, a hazard that has seriously affected the arboriculture industry since its inception. Another way Davey has started operationalizing HOP is through Foresight, a tool for hazard identification and mitigation. Foresight is a tool built to help frontline employees recognize and mitigate hazards on their jobsite that they will face that day. Building off our recognize, protect, and reconsider action cycle, Foresight keeps our most serious areas of significant injury and fatality at the forefront of our employee’s consideration every day.

Organizations with limited resources often assume meaningful HSE improvement requires new programs, technology, or headcount. In reality, some of the most effective improvements come from better leadership behaviors, clearer priorities, and stronger system design. This session challenges the myth that progress requires capital and demonstrates how Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) can drive real results in scrappy, fast-moving environments.


Grounded in real-world experience, the session explores why traditional, compliance-heavy approaches often fail to prevent serious incidents in resource-constrained organizations and how a human-centered HOP approach provides a practical alternative. Participants are introduced to core HOP principles—learning from normal work, understanding variability, and designing systems that support people under real conditions—in ways that are immediately applicable.


A key focus is serious injury and fatality prevention through identification and strengthening of critical controls, using simple, no-cost risk assessment techniques. The session also highlights leadership behaviors that influence trust, learning, and culture without formal programs or additional resources. Participants will leave with practical tools and zero-cost actions they can implement immediately.

Elite athletes visualize failure before it happens, yet most organizations wait for an incident to learn. What if frontline workers were trained like top performers instead of compliance check boxes?


Organizations invest significant time and resources in training yet many struggle to prove how learning translates into real-world performance and measurable risk reduction. Completion rates and certifications may demonstrate participation, but they rarely indicate readiness decision quality or the ability to perform under pressure.


High-performing athletes do not rely on repetition alone. They use visualization to mentally rehearse high-risk scenarios anticipate mistakes and execute effectively when it matters most. This session challenges leaders to apply the same performance principle to frontline work where the cost of failure includes injuries downtime regulatory exposure and reputational risk.


The session explores how organizations can move beyond compliance-based learning by connecting training visualization and operational data. By linking learning programs with incidents, near misses, audits, human performance indicators and making risk visible organizations can enable frontline teams to mentally rehearse the scenarios they are most likely to face. This approach transforms training from a static event into a dynamic system that reinforces critical behaviors before incidents occur. Attendees will learn practical executive-relevant approaches for aligning learning investments with real operational risk improving frontline adoption and creating continuous feedback loops between learning EHS and operations. The session highlight show connected systems allow leaders to measure what truly matters preparedness performance and risk reduction.


Key takeaways include:

1. How to shift learning from a compliance requirement to a performance and risk management lever
2. Why visualization is a proven but underutilized capability in frontline safety and operations
3. How to connect training with real-world safety and operational data to drive relevance
4. Strategies for improving frontline engagement without adding burden
5. Metrics that reflect readiness behavior change and impact on risk 

HOP, In a Box! – Accelerating Human and Organizational Performance Across Boundaries
When direct control isn’t possible, how can organizations help partners adopt Human Performance Improvement (HPI) principles? At Southern Company Gas, we faced this challenge with our contract partners and developed HOP, In a Box! a scalable approach grounded in the Principles of Human Performance Improvement and the use of Learning Teams to understand contractor utility damage events. 
 
This initiative delivered free, modular webinars and mobile resources to guide partners, many of which were small companies without resources to hire consultants, through building a business case, understanding HPI fundamentals, implementing strategies, and applying learning teams for event response. By making HPI tools accessible and copyright‑free, we enabled partners to integrate HOP concepts into their own organizations without mandates or barriers.
 
The result: measurable reductions in contractor facility damages and stronger learning cultures. This presentation shares how democratizing HPI resources can foster reliability, resilience, and sustained performance improvement across organizational boundaries.

Operational waste, such as rework, friction, workarounds, delays, duplicated steps, and overcomplicated controls, is often your earliest signal of system stress. These are not just productivity problems. They are indicators that Work-as-Imagined (WAI) and Work-as-Done (WAD) are drifting apart.


Most organizations manage to the Black Line, the procedures, rules, and documented controls that describe how work should happen. But performance actually lives in the Blue Line, how work really gets done under real-world pressure, variability, and constraint.


The gap between Black Line and Blue Line is where learning lives. And it’s also where waste, friction, control erosion, and weak signals begin to accumulate. Most safety systems focus on closing compliance gaps. High-performing systems focus on understanding alignment gaps.


This session explores how HOP and operational learning tools, like the 4Ds, and AI can help you systematically learn from everyday operations at scale, not just from incidents. Instead of waiting for failure, you’ll discover how to surface early indicators of system strain by examining where WAI and WAD diverge across sites, teams, and environments.


You’ll learn how operational waste reveals:

1. Where work is “Difficult” and creating cognitive overload
2. Where processes are “Different” and introducing instability
3. Where exposure is becoming “Dangerous” beneath normal production
4. Where systems are “Dumb” adding steps that no longer make sense

These signals show up long before injury or loss. They show up in everyday work.


To scale this learning, organizations must move beyond isolated conversations and static reports. This scaling will be constrained without using AI as a Learning Amplifier, Not a Control Mechanism. An ethical and human-centered approach to AI is vital. AI should be:

1. A pattern amplifier, not a people predictor
2. A sensemaking assistant, not a decision-maker
3. A weak signal detector, not a surveillance tool
4. A conversation catalyst, not a compliance enforcer

AI helps connect Blue Line realities across operations. Humans interpret the meaning.

By 2026, digital JSAs, operational digital twins, sentry cobots, AI copilots, and wearable technologies are no longer futuristic concepts — they are becoming part of everyday work. Yet these same technologies sit at a critical crossroads: they can be used to surveil people to ensure they do work compliantly, or to design systems so people can work safely.
The difference isn’t the technology. It’s intent.
This session takes participants through a “day in the life” of three roles in 2026 — a frontline worker, a manager, and an engineer — each interacting with advanced digital tools. For each role, two possible futures are explored. In one, technology becomes a compliance engine, amplifying oversight, reinforcing blame, and threatening professional identity and expertise. In the other, technology becomes a capacity-building partner, reshaping work design, revealing hidden constraints, and enabling resilient human performance.
Drawing on Human and Organizational Performance (HOP, the session explores a central tension of innovation: every innovation threatens someone’s expertise — and resistance is often a rational and predictable response. Participants will examine how intent, governance, and organizational learning practices determine whether technology becomes a digital tattletale or a cognitive aid.
This session explores the next frontier of HOP: designing digital systems that support how humans actually think, learn, and perform.

In this session, attendees will learn emerging modern safety science principles through the experience of Children’s Hospitals’ Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS), the leading North American safety network aiming to eliminate serious harm in children’s hospitals. Through an all teach, all learn philosophy, SPS member hospitals are applying proactive safety approaches to achieve breakthrough results. While rooted in healthcare, the principles and tools discussed are broadly applicable to safety-critical work across industries and align with HOP principles. 
Learners will be introduced to SPS proactive safety tools and will be provided an overview of how this structured approach promoted learning from everyday work in network hospitals. Participants will then engage in interactive activities and learn how to apply two specific proactive safety tools: proactive safety huddles and walk-through talk-through. These easy-to-use tools support the creation of safer, more reliable systems by learning from normal work at the frontline in complex operational environments. Proactive safety huddles are an interdisciplinary huddle used to anticipate and mitigate potential risks before an undesirable event occurs. Walk-through talk-through is a method for learning directly from frontline team members about gaps between work-as-done and work-as-imagined for a specific critical task, leading to opportunities for system optimization. 
Proactive safety huddles and walk-through talk-through are specifically designed to support and enhance the performance of our frontline workforce, setting a path to excellence in organizational outcomes. Practical applications will be highlighted so that participants can take these proactive safety tools back to their organizations and immediately put them into use.

Part I of II

In high-risk work, we often separate what can harm us (energy) from how work actually gets done (human performance). This disconnect creates blind spots that no amount of compliance or coaching can fully close.


This session explores how to bridge that gap by integrating energy-based safety with Human & Organizational Performance (HOP). Using practical field examples and operational scenarios, we’ll examine how unseen energy sources and normal human adaptations intersect—and why that intersection is where safety is truly won or lost.
Participants will walk away with:

• A clearer way to identify and think about energy hazards beyond the obvious (gravity and motion)
• Insight into how system conditions shape human decisions and exposure to energy
• Practical approaches to align hazard recognition, system design, and human performance in real work

Rather than focusing on eliminating error or controlling behavior, this session reframes safety as a function of designing systems that account for both energy and the realities of human work.
If we want better outcomes, we need better alignment between energy, systems, and people.

Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) principles have been in existence for decades, distilled from research, field experience, and lessons learned across various industries. These principles are deceptively simple—recognizing human fallibility, understanding that context drives behavior, and valuing learning as a core mechanism for improvement. Yet knowing the principles and living them are two very different challenges.

Frontlines workers are hired to complete tasks. Sometimes those tasks are completed in dynamic environments working close to high energy. Cognitive overload is a real issue for workers adapting to solve problems, especially if a task is unfamiliar.

Artificial Intelligence is already drafting risk assessments, analysing incident data, generating safety communications, and automating assurance workflows. But does that trajectory end with AI supporting safety practice—or replacing it? This double breakout session uses a structured, high-energy debate format to test that question in real time, separating hype from operational reality and exposing what “replacement” really means in complex sociotechnical systems.
In the first 50-minute session, participants will nominate as speakers and be randomly allocated to either the Affirmative (“AI will replace the Safety Practitioner”) or the Negative (“AI will not replace the Safety Practitioner”). Teams will rapidly build their case using guided prompts and fast research, while the rest of the room engages in a facilitated, interactive discussion to surface assumptions, evidence, risks, and ethical boundaries. Together we will map the strongest arguments on both sides—covering capability, accountability, regulation, human judgement, leadership, organisational learning, and the messy realities of work-as-done.


In the second 50-minute session, the room becomes a formal debating chamber. Teams deliver timed opening statements, structured rebuttals, and closing arguments, supported by a timekeeper and clear rules of engagement. The audience acts as adjudicators, voting on the winner and sharing the reasoning behind their decision. The facilitator will officiate, synthesise themes, and provide feedback—connecting debate insights to practical implications for the safety profession: what to automate, what to augment, what to protect, and what new capability the next generation of safety practitioners will need.


Participants will leave with a sharper, evidence-informed view of AI’s realistic role in safety—and a clearer line between tasks that can be mechanised and responsibilities that must remain human-led.

Every single one of us has an internal script that tells us we aren’t good enough.  Every. Single. One.  And our fear of naming our fear is holding us back.  When was the last time you heard a leader say, “Give me a moment. I’m experiencing fear, and I’m worried it will impact what I do next?” Instead, we allow fight or flight to sweep us into our unconscious patterned behaviors: command and control, anger, disengagement, overthinking- the very things that reinforce a culture of disconnection and fear.  Around and around we go. This cycle is compounded by the fact that we are inundated with knowing about leadership—articles, frameworks, titles of the “good” types of leaders, endless “you should’s.” Guess what? We know. We KNOW! We want to be those leaders. Desperately. And yet we feel stuck. It turns out that knowing what makes us strong leaders isn’t enough.  We cannot KNOWLEDGE ourselves into new behaviors, and we feel guilty that we can’t.  


It takes two things to break this cycle:
We must acknowledge fear in the moment (it is a normal part of the human experience anyway)
We must have skills we can rely on when things get “hot.”


Let’s begin with a practice Brene Brown practice calls “Above/Below the line,” (Strong Ground, 2025). Brene and her team use the model below (attributed to Robert Kiyosaki) to reinforce the power of acknowledging fear (the “line”) and choosing to stay ABOVE it by intentionally selecting our behaviors instead of allowing our own “below the line” unconscious behaviors to drive.  Brene refers to the pause and acknowledgement of fear as the divider.  This line separates the moments when we are able to act as coach creator, or challenger, from our more common fear-driven defaults of hero, victim, or villain. If you are confident you never react as hero, victim, or villain- we encourage you to challenge that belief.  


Awareness of fear is the first step.  It plants our feet on the line and introduces the possibility of choosing an intentional response. Staying above the line requires a whole lot more than just insight/knowledge.  In fact, if you are like us, it can feel like an all-out cat fight!   Staying anchored above the line requires us to endure discomfort. It turns out that change does not happen at the speed of our knowing—but at the speed of our nervous systems- those same nervous systems often flooded by “I’m not good enough”. Even when emotions are raw, this requires us to hold discomfort, to pause, and to stay present with ourselves.  We think of it like the ability to hold our own hands.  


No one can do this work for us. Psychological safety in the environment is necessary—but insufficient. We must find our own pause buttons and learn to press them in the moments that matter— unlocking capacity by naming that we are experiencing fear, challenging the beliefs that we are not good enough,  and trusting our own ability to engage intentionally.   Only then can we move from our patterned reactions to intentional action—to build trust with those around us, which enables learning. This is how we get unstuck.




Fear-driven “below the line” patterns look like telling, power-over, disengagement, silence, anger, over-emotion, over-analysis, and overwork. These behaviors disconnect us from others and further dysregulate our nervous systems in a self-reinforcing loop. We don’t choose them consciously.  We don’t wake up in the morning and set a goal to be the hero, or to assume a victim mentality. We have learned those patterns throughout our lives, and in some settings they are even reinforced/rewarded.  We all have been in huddles that celebrate the heroes who let fear drive and circumvent a system.  


So, first we must acknowledge our own fears and build our ability to endure discomfort.  Then, we reach for specific skills we have already practiced in a safe environment. 
 
Connection-building “above the line” behaviors—curiosity, listening, and genuine questions—interrupt this loop and create the conditions for learning and trust. One of our anchors in this work has been the book Humble Inquiry by H Shein, which offers a practical pathway for staying “above the line” by inviting curiosity in place of certainty, especially when fear is present. Schein emphasizes asking genuine, open questions that reduce defensiveness, build trust, and keep relationships intact—creating the conditions where people speak more freely and notice fear without being driven by it. In this way, Humble Inquiry becomes a framework for interrupting patterned reactions and intentionally choosing connection, learning, and shared understanding.


When the three of us coach teams, we use a set of balancing skills (think of them helping you balance on top of the line).  We print the icons on a physical piece of paper for each team member so they have something tangible to hold onto.  And then we practice together in safe spaces.  This work is not magic. 
You don’t have to be born with these skills. You CAN learn them.  And it takes practice.  


Maybe this ignites fear for you.  Maybe this feels scary or overwhelming because it is so counterculture. Can you acknowledge your fear so you can climb onto the line?   Can you imagine tolerating the discomfort of the unfamiliar or unpredictable, and then choosing your next move from a clear set of explicit skills you know will build trust with those around you instead of breaking it down?  We believe you can.  

Part 1 of 2
Significant risks hide in our daily successes, but we don't have to wait for incidents to occur to learn -- we can learn every day through good habits, routines, and structured daily debriefs. Drawing on concepts from his 2026 book, Safety Science for Outdoor & Experiential Education, Steve Smith will provide an overview of HOP Principles and invite participants to practice debriefing through two different lenses - a traditional approach, and a HOP-informed approach. What are effective ways to use daily debriefs and guiding questions to understand the difference between work-as-imagined and work-as-done? This session will be 50% presentation, 50% hands-on-practice and applying the concepts from the presentation to actual, recent events and participant experiences, in the spirit of learning, not blaming.

In this information packed session, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the elements that drive worker adaptability during the performance of their tasks. We will look at both the physical and performance hazards impacting individuals during task performance. Provide definitions to abide by so there is no debate on what is being talked about. And lastly provide a process that can be followed immediately upon return to work so they can determine drivers of worker adaptability. 

In this session, attendees will learn emerging modern safety science principles through the experience of Children’s Hospitals’ Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS), the leading North American safety network aiming to eliminate serious harm in children’s hospitals. Through an all teach, all learn philosophy, SPS member hospitals are applying proactive safety approaches to achieve breakthrough results. While rooted in healthcare, the principles and tools discussed are broadly applicable to safety-critical work across industries and align with HOP principles. 
Learners will be introduced to SPS proactive safety tools and will be provided an overview of how this structured approach promoted learning from everyday work in network hospitals. Participants will then engage in interactive activities and learn how to apply two specific proactive safety tools: proactive safety huddles and walk-through talk-through. These easy-to-use tools support the creation of safer, more reliable systems by learning from normal work at the frontline in complex operational environments. Proactive safety huddles are an interdisciplinary huddle used to anticipate and mitigate potential risks before an undesirable event occurs. Walk-through talk-through is a method for learning directly from frontline team members about gaps between work-as-done and work-as-imagined for a specific critical task, leading to opportunities for system optimization. 
Proactive safety huddles and walk-through talk-through are specifically designed to support and enhance the performance of our frontline workforce, setting a path to excellence in organizational outcomes. Practical applications will be highlighted so that participants can take these proactive safety tools back to their organizations and immediately put them into use.

Part II of II

In high-risk work, we often separate what can harm us (energy) from how work actually gets done (human performance). This disconnect creates blind spots that no amount of compliance or coaching can fully close.


This session explores how to bridge that gap by integrating energy-based safety with Human & Organizational Performance (HOP). Using practical field examples and operational scenarios, we’ll examine how unseen energy sources and normal human adaptations intersect—and why that intersection is where safety is truly won or lost.
Participants will walk away with:

• A clearer way to identify and think about energy hazards beyond the obvious (gravity and motion)
• Insight into how system conditions shape human decisions and exposure to energy
• Practical approaches to align hazard recognition, system design, and human performance in real work

Rather than focusing on eliminating error or controlling behavior, this session reframes safety as a function of designing systems that account for both energy and the realities of human work.
If we want better outcomes, we need better alignment between energy, systems, and people.

Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) reminds us that error is normal, context drives behavior, learning is vital, and how leaders respond matters. But how do we know whether these principles are truly alive in an organization?


The answer may be found in language.


This session explores how the everyday language used between frontline leaders and crews during planning conversations serves as a real-time indicator of system health, psychological safety, and learning capacity. Drawing on analysis of millions of operational conversations, we examine how patterns in questioning, participation, hazard discussion, and tone reveal whether an organization is fostering engagement or reinforcing compliance.


Work environments characterized by stronger conversational quality demonstrated significantly lower incident likelihood, suggesting that language itself can function as a leading indicator of operational risk.


By making workplace dialogue visible through simple capture and scalable language analysis, organizations can move beyond lagging metrics and begin measuring level of psychological safety, risk, performance and learning capacity directly. This session offers a practical framework and field proven platform for leaders seeking to operationalize HOP principles by paying close attention to the words that shape performance every day.

Boulder Scientific Company, a specialty chemical manufacturer based in Mead, Colorado, faced significant challenges following its acquisition by a private equity firm in 2019. The firm's objective was to revitalize the organization, enhance its value, and position it for profitable resale, with a critical focus on overhauling its safety approach and outcomes. Initial efforts employing traditional safety methodologies not only failed to yield improvements but exacerbated existing issues, leading to deteriorating performance metrics.


Seeking an innovative solution, Boulder Scientific engaged G.R.I.T. USA Inc. to develop and execute a comprehensive Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) roadmap and implementation strategy. Now in the third year of this multi-phase initiative, the organization has achieved remarkable progress. By the conclusion of the second year, Boulder Scientific received recognition from the Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates (SOCMA) for its exemplary safety achievements, underscoring the efficacy of HOP strategies and methodologies in fostering a resilient safety culture.


This presentation will detail the HOP implementation process, highlighting key strategies that bridged strategic objectives with frontline operations. Attendees will gain insights into quantifiable return on investment (ROI) metrics, including reductions in incident rates, enhanced operational efficiency, and financial gains that supported the private equity turnaround goals. Furthermore, a structured five-year roadmap will be outlined, enabling organizations to transition to full independence from external consultants while sustaining long-term HOP integration. Through this case study, participants will acquire practical tools for driving cultural transformation, risk mitigation, and performance optimization in high-stakes industries.

What if we told you that human error isn’t the problem – it’s the key to improvement?  Welcome to the world of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), where failure isn’t a dead end but a doorway to learning.  In this engaging and eye-opening session, we’ll break down the core principles of HOP, exploring how organizations can shift from a culture of blame to one of resilience, adaptability, and continuous improvement.   Through real-world examples, interactive discussion, and practical takeaways, you’ll discover why traditional safety and performance models fall short – and how embracing a HOP mindset can drive better outcomes for individuals, teams, and entire organizations.  Whether you’re new to HOP or looking to reinforce foundational concepts, this session will challenge the way you think about mistakes, accountability, and success.  

Neurodivergent, Neurotypical, Neurodiverse – These terms keep popping up in social media as a rapidly increasing contingent of the public self identifies as having an atypical neurotype. What does this mean for those of us working in Safety, Quality, and Organization Learning roles? How do we make the most of this new awareness to raise our social Intelligence Quotients and foster both deeper understanding and greater team efficiency.


Disclaimer: I am not a clinician. I am not a neuroscientist. What I am is a Late diagnosed Autistic with ADHD who has become a consumer of content put out by the neurodivergent community, both scientific and social. Everything I take in is carefully curated and catalogued in the ever-curious, correlation-based, content management system in my brain. However, frequently this data is repackaged in a way that people have found relatable, meaningful, and informative, so I keep building binders and developing abstracts.   In this 50 minute breakout I will provide some social context for Understanding the differences in Communications and Processing styles for our Neurodivergent teammates and start a dialogue about how to better integrate their unique perspectives into our learning teams.

How much money do large corporations spend on coffee each year?  The answer is often millions of dollars.  Compare that to their investment in disciplined organizational learning... and you will see that coffee frequently wins by a large margin!

This is not an indictment of coffee!  But it does raise an important question: Why do organizations routinely underinvest in the systems that reduce failure, strengthen margins, and build resilience?

Organizations invest in training, investigations, learning reviews, and improvement initiatives.  Yet few can clearly articulate the return on those investments.  As a result, organizational learning is often reactive and compliance-driven rather than positioned as a strategic capability.  That gap represents a significant lost opportunity.

This session explores how to quantify what truly counts.

Rather than reducing learning to financial metrics alone, we will examine ROI as a systems design question: How does organizational learning reduce problem burden, strengthen safety and operational buffer, improve decision quality, and enhance long-term performance.  And how do we measure impact?

Participants will explore a practical framework built around three elements:

• Problem Burden – The quantitative and qualitative costs of recurring failures, inefficiencies, and unmanaged risk
• Learning Capability Investment – The investment required to build and sustain disciplined learning systems
• Return – Risk reduction, stability, decision quality, and operational resilience

Through real-world examples across high-risk industries, we will examine:

• How to model the cost of reactive learning
• How to view organizational learning as a strategic investment
• How to communicate learning value in the language of decision makers
• How to avoid “learning activity” that produces motion without measurable impact

Artificial Intelligence is already drafting risk assessments, analysing incident data, generating safety communications, and automating assurance workflows. But does that trajectory end with AI supporting safety practice—or replacing it? This double breakout session uses a structured, high-energy debate format to test that question in real time, separating hype from operational reality and exposing what “replacement” really means in complex sociotechnical systems.
In the first 50-minute session, participants will nominate as speakers and be randomly allocated to either the Affirmative (“AI will replace the Safety Practitioner”) or the Negative (“AI will not replace the Safety Practitioner”). Teams will rapidly build their case using guided prompts and fast research, while the rest of the room engages in a facilitated, interactive discussion to surface assumptions, evidence, risks, and ethical boundaries. Together we will map the strongest arguments on both sides—covering capability, accountability, regulation, human judgement, leadership, organisational learning, and the messy realities of work-as-done.


In the second 50-minute session, the room becomes a formal debating chamber. Teams deliver timed opening statements, structured rebuttals, and closing arguments, supported by a timekeeper and clear rules of engagement. The audience acts as adjudicators, voting on the winner and sharing the reasoning behind their decision. The facilitator will officiate, synthesise themes, and provide feedback—connecting debate insights to practical implications for the safety profession: what to automate, what to augment, what to protect, and what new capability the next generation of safety practitioners will need.


Participants will leave with a sharper, evidence-informed view of AI’s realistic role in safety—and a clearer line between tasks that can be mechanised and responsibilities that must remain human-led.

Note:  This is Part II of a two‑part session and is designed to be attended after Part I.

Every single one of us has an internal script that tells us we aren’t good enough. Every. Single. One. And our fear of naming our fear is holding us back. When was the last time you heard a leader say, “Give me a moment. I’m experiencing fear, and I’m worried it will impact what I do next?” Instead, we allow fight or flight to sweep us into our unconscious patterned behaviors: command and control, anger, disengagement, overthinking- the very things that reinforce a culture of disconnection and fear. Around and around we go. This cycle is compounded by the fact that we are inundated with knowing about leadership—articles, frameworks, titles of the “good” types of leaders, endless “you should’s.” Guess what? We know. We KNOW! We want to be those leaders. Desperately. And yet we feel stuck. It turns out that knowing what makes us strong leaders isn’t enough. We cannot KNOWLEDGE ourselves into new behaviors, and we feel guilty that we can’t.


It takes two things to break this cycle:
We must acknowledge fear in the moment (it is a normal part of the human experience anyway)
We must have skills we can rely on when things get “hot.”


Let’s begin with a practice Brene Brown practice calls “Above/Below the line,” (Strong Ground, 2025). Brene and her team use the model below (attributed to Robert Kiyosaki) to reinforce the power of acknowledging fear (the “line”) and choosing to stay ABOVE it by intentionally selecting our behaviors instead of allowing our own “below the line” unconscious behaviors to drive. Brene refers to the pause and acknowledgement of fear as the divider. This line separates the moments when we are able to act as coach creator, or challenger, from our more common fear-driven defaults of hero, victim, or villain. If you are confident you never react as hero, victim, or villain- we encourage you to challenge that belief.


Awareness of fear is the first step. It plants our feet on the line and introduces the possibility of choosing an intentional response. Staying above the line requires a whole lot more than just insight/knowledge. In fact, if you are like us, it can feel like an all-out cat fight! Staying anchored above the line requires us to endure discomfort. It turns out that change does not happen at the speed of our knowing—but at the speed of our nervous systems- those same nervous systems often flooded by “I’m not good enough”. Even when emotions are raw, this requires us to hold discomfort, to pause, and to stay present with ourselves. We think of it like the ability to hold our own hands.


No one can do this work for us. Psychological safety in the environment is necessary—but insufficient. We must find our own pause buttons and learn to press them in the moments that matter— unlocking capacity by naming that we are experiencing fear, challenging the beliefs that we are not good enough, and trusting our own ability to engage intentionally. Only then can we move from our patterned reactions to intentional action—to build trust with those around us, which enables learning. This is how we get unstuck.




Fear-driven “below the line” patterns look like telling, power-over, disengagement, silence, anger, over-emotion, over-analysis, and overwork. These behaviors disconnect us from others and further dysregulate our nervous systems in a self-reinforcing loop. We don’t choose them consciously. We don’t wake up in the morning and set a goal to be the hero, or to assume a victim mentality. We have learned those patterns throughout our lives, and in some settings they are even reinforced/rewarded. We all have been in huddles that celebrate the heroes who let fear drive and circumvent a system.


So, first we must acknowledge our own fears and build our ability to endure discomfort. Then, we reach for specific skills we have already practiced in a safe environment.

Connection-building “above the line” behaviors—curiosity, listening, and genuine questions—interrupt this loop and create the conditions for learning and trust. One of our anchors in this work has been the book Humble Inquiry by H Shein, which offers a practical pathway for staying “above the line” by inviting curiosity in place of certainty, especially when fear is present. Schein emphasizes asking genuine, open questions that reduce defensiveness, build trust, and keep relationships intact—creating the conditions where people speak more freely and notice fear without being driven by it. In this way, Humble Inquiry becomes a framework for interrupting patterned reactions and intentionally choosing connection, learning, and shared understanding.


When the three of us coach teams, we use a set of balancing skills (think of them helping you balance on top of the line). We print the icons on a physical piece of paper for each team member so they have something tangible to hold onto. And then we practice together in safe spaces. This work is not magic.
You don’t have to be born with these skills. You CAN learn them. And it takes practice.


Maybe this ignites fear for you.  Maybe this feels scary or overwhelming because it is so counterculture. Can you acknowledge your fear so you can climb onto the line?   Can you imagine tolerating the discomfort of the unfamiliar or unpredictable, and then choosing your next move from a clear set of explicit skills you know will build trust with those around you instead of breaking it down?  We believe you can.  

Part 2

Significant risks hide in our daily successes, but we don't have to wait for incidents to occur to learn -- we can learn every day through good habits, routines, and structured daily debriefs. Drawing on concepts from his 2026 book, Safety Science for Outdoor & Experiential Education, Steve Smith will provide an overview of HOP Principles and invite participants to practice debriefing through two different lenses - a traditional approach, and a HOP-informed approach. What are effective ways to use daily debriefs and guiding questions to understand the difference between work-as-imagined and work-as-done? This session will be 50% presentation, 50% hands-on-practice and applying the concepts from the presentation to actual, recent events and participant experiences, in the spirt of learning, not blaming.

In this information packed session, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the elements that drive worker adaptability during the performance of their tasks. We will look at both the physical and performance hazards impacting individuals during task performance. Provide definitions to abide by so there is no debate on what is being talked about. And lastly provide a process that can be followed immediately upon return to work so they can determine drivers of worker adaptability. 

When the restaurants are close by, Wednesday night turns into our official Dine‑Around Adventure. Think of it as a roaming dinner party where groups of attendees scatter to nearby restaurants and keep the conversations (and the laughter) going.

Swing by the lobby to find your dinner crew, then head out together on a quest for good food, good company, and maybe even a new favorite spot. Great local eats + great people = the perfect mid‑week combo.