The rise of learning teams: How organisations in Australia are adopting group learning practices for safety improvement

This Master’s thesis from Andrew Barrett explored group learning practices, like learning teams, for safety improvement.

Specifically, he studied the following question via institutional ethnographic interviews:

·???????? how are organisations in Australia adopting group learning practices for safety improvement?

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Way too much to cover – so check out the thesis.

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Some background extracts:

·???????? “Safety professionals across Australia are getting increasingly excited about group learning practices for safety improvement, such as 'learning teams'”

·???????? “They are motivated to introduce these new practices to their organisation either as an addition to or replacement for longstanding safety activities such as incident investigations, despite scant theoretical or empirical research about their functioning or implementation”

?·????????The ages of safety [** sometimes called waves] was reflected upon from the angle of learning, below

·???????? The phrase ‘learning team’ was found to be used extensively in the pedagogical research

·???????? Quality Circles were also described – said to be “ostensibly very similar” to the learning teams described by Conklin

·???????? “Among safety professionals, the increasingly popular practice of ‘learning teams’ is most likely attributed to Dr Todd Conklin”

·???????? Andrew found among a number of texts that they “contain a significant number of ideas which make general claims about links between learning teams and safety improvement”

·???????? This includes “learning from work as done (versus work as prescribed, or work as seen post-incident) leading to better information to base improvements upon, drawing on the ‘expertise’ of frontline workers for more effective actions and engaged implementation, slowing the ‘rush’ to fix versus learn, the efficacy of groups problem solving versus individual efforts, how blame inhibits access to knowledge, the role and competence of the facilitator, linear vs systemic thinking, the effect of hindsight bias, the effects of agency, participation, and experimentation, and the use of questions in enquiry”

·???????? Andrew covered one of the few studies which directly explored safety learning teams; which was compared to investigation reports. This study found that learning teams, compared to the typical root cause investigations, “generated more actions than Root Cause Analysis, and more actions that were system-focussed”

Some insights from the study: (I’ve skipped heaps)

Outsiders are central to adoption of group learning practices:

·???????? People engage in a “significant amount of 'convincing work' of stakeholders, to get group learning started”

·???????? This is facilitated by bringing in outsiders with “outside ideas”, which are then blended and synthesised to create convincing ideas for that organisational context

·???????? The adoption of group learning practices involved people enduring and creating ‘struggles’; struggles “appeared when organisational stakeholders pre-existing worldviews were challenged by new concepts supportive of group learning. People also struggled with the new practices criticising or supplanting existing practices (such as investigations)”

·???????? People were also found to struggle with more nuanced concepts, like “reducing or removing blame and punishment, or realising more clearly how work was actually done versus how it was imagined”

·???????? People were criticised for their lack of action in implementing new practices, but starting work ‘imperfectly’ also created it’s own problems

·???????? The adoption of new practices were hampered “existing safety systems, often disconnected from but still dependent on these systems”

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Group learning adoption depends on outsiders:

·???????? People remarked that in order to progress past a level of stagnation, they were connected with new people in the company who were able to shake things up and allow the initiatives to progress

·???????? Andrew observes that even when he tried to steer questions back to the individual and their own experiences ,”they quickly re-directed our dialogue towards others, revealing the names, locations and explanatory context behind one or a small number of ‘key’ people”

·???????? He also observed some interesting use of concepts by participants; quoting the paper, one informant said “my thing is, safety is an ethical responsibility”. They express this as their own idea or belief, but it is not entirely theirs. It is a direct quote from Sidney Dekker, describing the principles of Safety Differently (Dekker, 2014, p8)”

·???????? Hence, “This makes Dekker a salient outsider to this company's GLPFSI adoption efforts”

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Mixing and synthesising concepts as conceptual work:

Here it’s noted that “informants mixed various concepts together”. And, unless I’m mistaken, I think this is saying that participants instead drew on a broader conceptual body rather than just sticking entirely to, say, Conklin’s application of learning teams. [** I might be mistaken, though]

Here’s a direct comment from a participant:

“Um, so learning teams3 was definitely from that, um, Safety Differently4 perspective. The reason why we now have a human operational performance model as we call it is, it's a mixture of techniques that have been developed from the Safety II5 world, high reliability organisations6, resilience engineering7, whatever you want to call it, paired with change management8. So long-term embedding in capability development, with, um, an operational focus, not just a safety focus. So that's why that's what makes human operational performance different to Safety II, Safety Differently.”

The findings also highlighted the work that helped to bridge the space between the “importation of concepts and their normalisation”. For example, participants used language and labels of specific concepts “but did not describe their work as literal copying or parroting”.

This instead reflected a process of reflection, recombination and revision of the concepts.

Andrew used an example of people discussing blue line and black line thinking. I’ve skipped most of the points, but one point he discusses is about “well-intentioned people wanting to deploy this specific concept deduce that the goal is to get frontline workers to force their blue line variability to match the black line plans as a kind of prescription and compliance”.

He notes that this isn’t the intent of the theory that informs blue-line/black-line thinking, “but that nuance inhabits the conceptual work people need to do when importing and mixing these concepts”.

So having all of the necessary concepts is one thing, but the conceptual work remains “to synthesise, recombine and represent them in ways that make sense in the company context”.

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Some final points taken from throughout the thesis were:

·???????? Informants “recognised where they needed to do more work on ‘systems’ or were falling short in systems despite GLPFSI beginning to happen inside their company”

·???????? An example with investigations was really interesting. Here it’s observed that there was a tension between group learning practices and the “authorised way of doing things”

·???????? For instance, “The ‘procedure’ was the primary authorised method for incident investigations so without change would not legitimise GLPFSI despite their everyday real-world success”

·???????? Further, “Existing systems in organizations often require that new practices, such as GLPFSI, need to be integrated into existing textual systems like databases, procedures and reports21.... This can be a struggle, as the informal, emergent nature of GLPFSI may not align with the formal requirements of organizational systems”

·???????? Andrew suggests that the final and most obvious open question is whether “GLPFSI actually lead to safety improvement”; this requires additional research

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And something else I liked, but maybe doesn’t fit perfectly into this summary (since I didn’t cover the supporting justification) is the following typology of functional and psychological barriers consumers have to adopting products:

Ref: Barrett, A. (2023). The rise of learning teams: How organisations in Australia are adopting group learning practices for safety improvement. Masters thesis. Griffith University