2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

The pandemic has led to an increased resonance surrounding psychosocial risk, highlighting its amplified relevance and prompting greater attention from various stakeholders. We now have international standards on this risk, and safety regulators worldwide are producing guidance and/or regulations to hold organizations accountable.
Brent Sutton and Diane Ah-Chan will present how the HOP Principles are being applied to understand this risk better, how designing better work creates better outcomes, and the role of “human error” and “system conditions” in psychosocial risk events from harassment and bullying to aggression and violence.

Background: 
Prior to 2022, United Airlines, the world’s largest airline by “available seat miles” (ASM), had a self-described “disconnected” approach to root cause analysis and organizational learning. Therefore, in 2022 United set out to identify a vendor to supply them with root cause analysis training, software, and support – primarily focused on Safety and Regulatory Compliance.  After an exhaustive search, they chose Sologic.

The scope of the program was broad.  All Safety incidents and risks would be reviewed using Sologic and Causelink.  Sologic would train the initial round of employees at multiple levels and then train a group of United “certified instructors” to take over from there.  All reportable regulatory issue reviews would also be conducted and reported using Sologic.

Why Applicable to CHOL:
In United’s case, they have truly embraced the learning journey.  They have created a learning “context” that maximizes uptake.  Their leadership, from VP level down, has shown that “how they respond matters.”  This presentation provides a very special and exclusive look “under the hood” of how these kinds of programs gestate, evolve, operate, and improve.

Perhaps most importantly, United is seeing results.  They now have a unified, consistent approach and toolset.  They are getting good uptake and buy-in.  And the regulator has been “extremely supportive” and “energized”.

The story of this journey is both widely applicable and should be interesting to CHOL attendees.  Companies can learn from what worked well for United – as well as what they might do differently next time.  Sologic can share what it’s like from the service provider’s perspective – as well as what we might do differently in the future.

"What created such a resilient response to the Mandalay Bay shooting?
Dr David MacIntyre will share with us his first-hand perspective as the trauma surgeon on call that night at Sunrise Hospital."

We learn through stories. Social/work groups share stories that inform group members how to stay socially safe from harm from other groups, what you can and cannot say to other groups, what motivates “other” groups, and who you can trust with information.
Not all stories are true! If someone trusted in a social group tells the group a story, it becomes the truth and becomes how groups sustain “truths that aren’t true”. Stories like “employees are our problem”, “the reason we have problems is that employees don’t engage”.
We often see data that validates our assumptions of what is true if we don’t have a way to challenge those assumptions.
In this presentation, the speaker provides 3 steps to understanding engagement through listening and narrative analysis, understanding how to influence group stories to align diverse groups around organisational purpose, and how to tell true stories that build momentum towards a desired future.
Short Description:
Changing the business narrative: Understanding how to
1.    Deconstruct the stories people share to reveal perceived truths, reasons for engagement;
2.    How to build a strategy to positively influence the narrative, &
3. How to build momentum by telling success stories that deliver the future you want to be part of.

MRI celebrates its reputation as 'the safe imaging option,' sometimes to its own detriment. In 2023, a hospital in a prominent healthcare organization experienced a catastrophic, near-fatal MRI accident, which almost evaded regulatory review. Thanks to public investigation records from both CMS and OSHA, a more comprehensive Root Cause Analysis could be done, illuminating failures in management & oversight, ambiguous lines of authority and responsibility, poor training, and normalization of deviance from safety practices. The analysis also suggests a hospital so wrapped up in its patient safety scores and confirmation-seeking that failed to identify longstanding weaknesses in their MRI safety.

This session identifies the specifics of what happened, highlighting the direct and indirect actions of each party, recreating the accident, including scaled representations of the MRI suite and animations of the events, pulled from the official accounts.

Then the presenters will share their RCA of the event, which breaks down the day’s activities to reveal latent, underlying causes and contributing factors, identifying the contributions of faulty training, failures of competency verification, lapses in oversight, and dangerous presumptions that regulatory or accreditation structures provided some assurances of MRI safety at the hospital.

Lastly, the presenters will share a series of identified remedial steps, applying to individuals, the hospital organization, and to the regulatory and oversight structures designed to provide assurances of minimum quality and safety. Without a complete feedback loop that breaks through the ‘safe imaging option’ bumper-sticker slogan and creates change, more accidents like this will happen in the future.

We presented “ChatGPT: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly” in last year’s conference.  This session will provide a one-year update to that presentation. This includes conducting the survey on the awareness and use of Generative AI technologies that was done in last year’s session, to see how the numbers have changed in this rapidly evolving area.
New to this year’s session will be a moderator-led panel discussion among experts and advisors familiar with these technologies.  The panel will then open up to the audience for an interactive discussion and sharing of experiences.