2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

Part 1 of 2

Most organisations are very good at investigating events. Far fewer are genuinely good at learning from them.


Too often, events trigger a familiar cycle: find the failure, identify the error, write the report, assign the actions, close it out. The language may sound modern, the process may look polished, but the outcome is often the same — shallow insight, predictable fixes, and missed opportunities to understand how work was really happening.


This 4-hour workshop is designed for people who already know the language of human performance and want to sharpen the practice. It focuses on one of the most persistent challenges in our field: how to learn from events in ways that move beyond hindsight, bias, blame, and investigation theatre.


Together, we will explore what gets in the way of meaningful learning after failure, disruption, and surprise, and what it takes to generate richer understanding in the real world of organisational pressure, competing agendas, and the need to “get to the answer.” The session will introduce practical tools and approaches for gathering better contextual data, exploring work as done, understanding local rationality, and producing outputs that are useful, credible, and capable of driving better decisions.


This is not a workshop about making investigations slightly better. It is about rethinking what we are trying to achieve after an event, and building the skills to do it in a way that people actually learn from.


If you have ever looked at an investigation and thought, “We still do not understand what really mattered here,” this workshop is for you.