2024 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 30th Annual Conference

This is a case study in how to manage SIF risks for work in a highly variable environment.
Many times, in many forums, I asked rooms full of line clearance workers the question “How many of you have run from a falling tree or limb?” Almost all raise their hands. Being struck-by wood kills many line clearance workers every year. As Director of Safety and Human Performance for a line clearance company, I heard early on: “if you do this job long enough, you will get seriously hurt”. We didn’t accept this. We took the approach to learn everything we could about the risk of being struck by a tree or limb…and we discovered some surprising things that helped us better manage the risk of being struck by wood.
A traditional safety approach to managing this risk is: stay out of the drop zone and use 3-way communication before entering. Rules are important but rules are not enough to manage the risks that emerge from quick changing situations that are common in highly variable environments.
Several months into our HOP journey, we had a key insight from Ohio State University Safety Researcher: line clearance is among the most highly variable work he had ever seen, he ranked it second only to the special forces. We realized behavior-based safety was not a good fit…so what next?
We needed to expand from traditional safety, which is often a STATIC view of risk: identify all hazards and risks PRIOR to starting work –and you’ll be ok - to practices that supported noticing emerging risks and uncertainty. We needed to learn as much as we could about how work really happens. We found patterns in the responses to the question “What surprised you?” from 50 struck-by wood events and close calls.
In this talk, I will share how to identify patterns in how people are surprised, which can lead to identifying risk factors to enable getting in front of SIF risks. I will share concepts, tools, and practices we invented (e.g., Uncertainty Gauge, Press Pause, and Stack-up of Risks) that are effective in managing emerging risks which are omnipresent in highly variable work.
4. Abstract: Resilience Engineering FUNdamentals
Beth Lay, President of Resilience Engineering Association and Director at Forge Works
RE/HRO track, Breakout session
Reliability is about producing predictable, desired outcomes. Reliability engineers see people as sources of error as they work in stable, repeatable systems. How do we get better – or more reliable - based on past performance?
Robustness is about being strong and sturdy. How can we make the system able to withstand known risks?
Resilience is about anticipating how we could be surprised and preparing people and our systems to adapt to variability. Resilience engineers see people as sources of adaptation as they work in complex, unstable systems. How can we design systems that gracefully extend to manage surprise? (because we will ALWAYS be surprised!)
Note: We need all three: reliable, robust, and resilient systems.
In this session, we will talk about what it means to move from a focus on control to embracing variability. We will explore Resilience Engineering fundamentals and share tools and practices that enable us to work successfully in variable environments and to be prepared for surprise.