2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

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.

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.

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.

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.