2026 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 32nd Annual Conference

CHOL-101

Stepping into a conference for the first time can feel overwhelming—but it doesn’t have to be. This high-impact session is designed specifically for first-time attendees who want to move beyond simply “showing up” to truly leveraging every opportunity the conference offers.
 
You’ll learn how to navigate the event with intention, from building a personalized agenda to identifying the sessions, people, and experiences that align with your goals. We’ll break down practical strategies for networking with confidence, engaging meaningfully in sessions, and turning chance encounters into lasting professional connections.
 
By attending, you’ll gain insider insights that transform uncertainty into clarity—so instead of missing out, you’ll walk away energized, connected, and equipped to amplify your entire conference experience. Whether your goal is learning, visibility, or career growth, this session ensures you don’t just attend—you thrive.

There are plenty of workshops on Root Cause Analysis that will teach you how to conduct accident investigations, walk you through a five-why, poke holes into the Swiss cheese of a barrier analysis, and even draw the fancy annotated circles and rectangles of an event and causal factor chart - That's not what this workshop is about.


Causal analysis succeeds not only when we reach a root cause statement with action plans, but also when we win management hearts and minds in recognizing the return on investment for the time spent performing the analysis. One of the most common complaints is that causal analysis is expensive - tying up expert resources for long periods with benefits that are more business necessary than value-added.


This course is about providing customizable facilitation skills that empower the practitioner to project-manage the causal analysis process, providing tools that create organizational efficiency, improve team performance outcomes, and foster transparent communication with management around realistic schedule forecasting for report completion.


In this course we will address the topics of:

1. Expertise and Skillsets - How to stack your team with the right members 
2. Pre-job briefing and Schedule Tools - How to set expectations for success with your team 
3. Focus Controls - What methods to deploy to control your schedule effectively 
4. Communication Plan - How to transparently communicate with Management
5. Pack your Go-bag - What stationary and supplies ensure efficiency
6. Fill your Tool Kit - What exercises and templates encompass your performance tool kit
7. Keep'em Engaged - What extra ingredients can keep your team present, engaged, and maybe even have some fun.            

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.

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.

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.

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.