Learning from daily work

We don’t have to wait for things to go wrong

We recognise that planned activities like audits, inspections, and reports are useful—but have limited predictive power. They don’t always contribute to greater resilience. We understand that employees, in addition to adaptive capacity, also have predictive capacity, and are therefore critical to our ability to bounce back.

They detect early warnings and weak signals much earlier than we would through scheduled audits and reviews.

Learning Teams and Pre-Mortems

We therefore spend a lot of time observing, analysing, presenting, reflecting, and evaluating learning goals and outcomes together with employees. We learn by listening to employees. We use Active Learning and Learning Teams, and conduct pre- and post-mortems. In this way, we learn from daily work. We understand that we learn mainly by doing. We focus more on the development of skills than on the transfer of information. We also learn a great deal by engaging in the execution of operational activities ourselves. Additionally, we learn by challenging our own interests, values, and attitudes during our learning processes.

Erik Hollnagel states that learning from daily work is much more logical and effective for us than learning from incidents. Incidents are relatively rare. Opportunities to learn from accidents are scarce. Additionally, the circumstances of incidents and accidents are often difficult to compare. And when similar incidents don’t repeat, we can’t verify whether lessons learned previously were effective.

Daily work reveals complexity and unpredictability

Daily work—despite its complexity and unpredictability—shows more recurring and similar situations, making it easier to verify learning effects. Learning from daily work is therefore easier to achieve and to validate than learning from incidents.

We want to understand how work is performed, how actually with complexibility, ambiguity, unpredictability and volatilty (a.k.a. ‘VUCA’) is dealt with, and why that usually happens successfully. For us, that is a key to understanding our successes and to further build our organisational resilience.

Learning Teams & the 4D’s

to follow soon…