2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

Forces of change are threatening to overwhelm the hard-won advances in the safety of complex systems. How can/will we adapt our pursuit of doing hard & complex work safely to meet the disrupting forces - some ostensibly positive?  To adapt, we need to apply the lessons about resilient performance to our own activities to renew and redirect safety energies. Drawing on cutting edge research and thoroughly grounded in the operational world, this presentation will use cases from space exploration, nuclear power generation, commercial air travel, and healthcare to link new research with insights for operational practice.

For those early on their HOP journey or for those who want to take a stroll down memory lane, join us for a quick review of how we got here and where we are headed.

Naturalistic Decision Making is a perspective for understanding and enhancing operational excellence. NDM researchers have been studying high proficiency professionals in a broad range of domains for 40 years. Along the way, they have developed generic model of expert performance, advanced naturalistic methods of discovery, and designed learning, systems, and organizational strategies to enable excellence and efficiency.

This talk will introduce the NDM paradigm, to include a brief review of key findings and models, and draw parallels between the goals of NDM and those of t CHOLearning and high reliability paradigms.

Background: The Children's Hospital's Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS) Network, a collaborative of 150 US and Canadian children's hospitals, aims to eliminate serious harm to patients and employees. Methods: The network facilitates collaborative learning and implementation of safety strategies, more recently to include evolving its approach to incorporate human and organizational performance, Safety II, and resilience engineering. Results: To date, the network has achieved a significant reduction in harm, benefiting approximately 30,000 patients and employees, while also yielding valuable leadership lessons regarding collaborative power, the inclusion of diverse perspectives, and innovation. Conclusion: Multi-organizational collaboration with a shared safety mission can be highly effective; sustained progress necessitates continuous adaptation and integration of modern safety theories.

CHOLearning/HPRCT conferences over the past three decades have greatly contributed to knowledge exchange among professionals in numerous areas related to performance improvement, including investigations, data analysis, causal analysis, corrective action development, and many others.
We’ve shared thoughts about how to help organizations do what they do in ways that are better, safer, faster. We’ve increased the tools available to individual “Cho practitioners” (to coin a term for those who come to this conference), and how we can produce output of better quality in greater volume. The potential benefit to our individual day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month work performance is huge.
What we have not spent much time on is the longer term – our personal year-to-year performance that, in many cases, spans decades. Bob Nelms introduced the subject in recent years when he talked about ‘getting off the Merry-Go-Round.’
This presentation builds upon that introduction, and draws upon the presenter’s personal observations over his 53-year career with regard to
• Those whose merry-go-rounds supported balanced, rewarding lives;
• Those whose merry-go-rounds drove them into the ground and substantially limited “life outside of work,” often with adverse performance impact at work as well;
• Those who rode their merry-go-rounds their entire adult lives, only to discover toward the end of their lives that they did not achieve what mattered most to them.
The presenter offers his thoughts about the “construction, maintenance, modification, and operation” of the Merry-Go-Rounds we choose to ride, and ends with a challenge to future conferences to probe further into this area.

We first explored AI at the 2023 Learning Conference, a time when interest in AI was soaring, especially following the release of ChatGPT 3.5, in the months prior to the conference.

During that session we conducted a live survey of the audience to gauge awareness and adoption of AI technologies among the attendees. We conducted an updated session and repeated the survey at CHOLearning 2024, tracking how adoption evolved. Those results can be found here: https://firstanalytics.com/chol_surveys/

By now many organizations represented at CHOLearning have put AI to work at varying levels or have plans to adopt it. In what may be our final update, we cover:
- A gentle overview of Analytical, Generative and Agentic AI. Agentic AI emerged in the at the close of 2024 and is experiencing a similar rapid rise in interest, much as did ChatGPT in early 2023.
- Real-world demonstrations of AI use cases relevant to attendees’ industries, including applications in Safety and RCA.
- An interactive discussion where attendees can share their AI experiences.
- Practical guidance for those looking to get started with AI.
- A review of live poll results to assess the current state of AI adoption among attendees.