Humans connect better to stories. They don’t connect to numbers.

It has been two years since the book “The Practice of Learning Teams”, by Brent Sutton , Glynis McCarthy and Brent Robinson , with a foreword by Todd Conklin , was published.

The book's premise was straightforward, to help support the community to move from the “What and Why” of HOP and Learning Teams to the “How and When” and to broaden the appeal of Learning Teams into the mainstream market.

That book was built on the amazing work of Todd Conklin and his original work on Learning Teams, published in 2016 in the book “An Applied Approach to Operational Learning”.?In that 2016 book, the wider safety community were introduced to the term “Learning Teams” and its core concepts and approach.

The rise and popularity of Learning Teams have surprised me, and you know when something becomes popular because commercial organizations;

1. Use the name “Learning Teams” to badge or push their own concepts.
2. Publish content about Learning Teams and re-write history by claiming its’ origin from other concepts.
3. State that Learning Teams are great BUT ….. (which means that Learning Teams aren’t good, but my version is much better).

The term Learning Teams was not a common term or language used in safety, quality, or operational excellence before Todd Conklin ’s work. It has become popular because the core concepts, approach and principles make sense to both organizations and the people who do the work every day. In our 2020 book “The Practice of Learning Teams”, we defined the five principles of Learning Teams (alongside the 5 principles of HOP), and we introduced the concept of three modes of Learning Teams, being;

• Event Learning Teams
• Management of Change Learning Teams
• Everyday Learning Teams

We also distinguished the difference between Operational Learning, Organizational Learning and Worker Learning. We followed up in more detail on the concept of “Everyday Learning Teams” in the 2021 book “Learning From Everyday Work” with Brent Sutton , Brent Robinson , Jeffery Lyth and Todd Conklin . In the second book, we explored in more detail how workers and workgroups could apply self-guided principles of Learning Teams to building organizational intelligence by identifying “weak signal” patterns and clusters from normal work and how workers and workgroups could “self-improve” through the power of critical evaluation and critical thinking. And then for the organization to use Learning Teams to target learning and deeper understanding from those trending “weak signals”.

Throughout my journey with Learning Teams, there has been a consistent pattern and theme from those that participate in a Learning Team and how the organization learns from the output of a Learning Teams; it is simply put as;

“Humans connect better to stories; they don’t connect to numbers”.

This was highlighted to me during the COVID-19 Pandemic. In the early stages of the Pandemic, we were all dealing with high levels of uncertainty. We were bombarded every day with case numbers and data about so many infections, so many hospitalisations, and so many deaths. Governments worldwide wanted people to implement risk management practices to eliminate or minimize the spread and exposure of COVID-19 to family, community, and work colleagues. As the virus mutated into more aggressive and deadlier variants and people’s appetite for elimination and minimization waned, I observed a change in the communication strategy. News and media were no longer just publishing the numbers, they were also telling tragic stories of those succumbing to the virus and the impact on families and communities. Simply put, they were providing the context for learning.

I observed a change in people's “risk appetite” by being more compliant and a rise in those who became more disenfranchised. Regardless of the extremes of the outliers, this approach worked for the mainstream group. My learning from this was;

“If you can’t identify with the people it’s affecting, you won’t identify with it at all”.

I also observed another phenomenon. As the Omicron strain took hold, those countries that followed an aggressive elimination strategy then moved to a minimization strategy, or what I call “Living with the effect and impact of COVID-19” across family, community, and industry. Those stories of the impact on people became few and far between. It was simply the numbers being reported. By removing the stories and just showing the numbers, fewer people identified with the losses (unless you were directly connected to the loss) and just kept carrying on. This simply emphasized my earlier learning that “Humans connect better to stories; they don’t connect to numbers”.

When we think about Learning Teams, we think about the power that storytelling can have. Storytelling leads to learning, and learning can lead to improvements. Remembering what workers learn and what the organization learns can be very different.

For example, when I engage with organizations about using Learning Teams to learn from adverse events, I describe the difference in learning this way. The opportunity for learning is presented by a better understanding of the variability and adaption that exists between;

• Work As Imagined (How the organization believes safe work is done every day)
• Normal Everyday Work (How workers function within the system to get their work done successfully every day)
• Work on the Day of the Event (How worker was being performed, leading up to, during and after the event)

In a Learning Team, we don’t hold Work As Imagined “WAI” as the “one true way” or “one right way” to do work. We don’t treat the gap between these three things as an unsafe act or non-conformance, latent failure, or the many other forms of misery we call human error. If we treat WAI as the “one true way” or “one right way” to do work, we are looking down at the worker through the system lens and placing the worker into the focus, creating a deficit model which impacts engagement, participation, representation and learning for those that actually face the risk every day.

In a Learning Team, we acknowledge the difference of learning between Organizational Learning, Workgroup Learning and Worker Learning.

The organization learns from better understanding the 3 parts of the triangle when people share their stories of normal everyday work.

Workers and the Workgroup learn from a better understanding of the 2 parts of the triangle.

Whether the Learning Team is for event learning or management of change learning, the better understanding of this gap is the place where operational learning becomes visible and transparent. And this gap can be an opportunity or a threat, or potentially both.

An opportunity could be, for example;

• Removing waste from the system of controls, mitigations, or defences that serve no purpose or are redundant to a process.
• Identifying the presence of “new” hazards or access to danger zones due to a work change.
• Your non-valued added or required activities (i.e., compliance) can be reduced and improved to make better sense to people.

A threat could be, for example;

• A change in a process that is seen as more efficient or effective by a workgroup but introduces a new risk or knock-on effect that was not visible or present before, and the workgroup have no prior knowledge or understanding.
• A change in a process by the organization or third party exposes workers to a new or unknown hazardous situation.
• The introduction of a new plant, material, or process that is higher in potential consequence ‘STKY” than the one it replaced.

How the organization responds to these opportunities and threats “really matters” because that response sets the “cultural tone” of risk appetite across workers and workgroups. This all leads to the big question?

How do we do this, in everyday work, where we don’t have the capacity or capability of conducting a traditional Learning Team, and more importantly, not use an intervention-based approach where the organization leads, and worker follow. Therefore if workers face the risk in the gap, why can’t workers lead that storytelling and learning opportunity?

Our Thinking

We believe that an approach to this is a “Self-Guided Facilitation” that allows the workers to get together to reflect on the presence of organizational defences, critical steps/controls and worker defences of “what they rely on” when dealing with dynamic risk environment which has the potential to cause life-changing events, “STKYs” (Stuff That Kills You)”.

The four (4) phases of this “Self-Guided Facilitation” are:

1. Recall the current state of knowledge
2. Reflect on past experiences (using the 4D’s - Dumb - Different - Difficult - Dangerous)
3. Resonate with that alternative information against a set of organizational factors that explore pressure to perform factors, factors that impact how the work is done, worker approach to dealing with risks, change work factors, action and decision-making influences to get the work done, organizational support of the safe systems of work, the role of work planning and preparation, situational awareness of different potential outcomes
4. Capture those learnings and evaluate the opportunities or threats that become visible and then reflect on them and ask;

• How do the organizational defences support them in that situation from occurring or getting worse?
• What they must rely on if it was to happen?
• How do they feel the organization would respond if such an event were to occur?

This creates a new state of knowledge in the workgroup through individual critical appraisal and group evaluation of the “Known knowns” of the formal system (the things the organisation does to reduce risk) and the informal system that workers rely on to be successful and create visibility of the previously “Unknown knowns”, which are the things that we are neither aware of nor understand, but somehow exist in the GAP between WAI and WAD “normal work”.?

This learning can be used by the organization and workers to build a future state of normal and successful everyday work.

Remember that there is a grey space between WAI/WAD or Black Line/Blue Line, and it is in this grey space where uncertainty lives and one not managed by organizational defences.

Our work in learning from everyday work is opening the door for both the organization and workers to understand better the presence or absence of capacity.? The themes that we have seen by learning from everyday work (using the 4D's and others) are:

1. Learning from everyday work does not require unwanted events
2. Learning from everyday work helps to see and build on what’s strong
3. Learning from everyday work helps to see slow changes and weak signals
4. Learning from everyday work can involve everyone to engage and participate
5. Learning from everyday work helps to improve all aspects of performance and wellbeing

And by better understanding what is known and unknown, especially for STKYs, you can see and understand the weak signals and those emerging "Blind Spots" where the potential for death lives.

You can read more about our work in "Learning From Everyday Work" by downloading the whitepaper here.