2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

Because there are no perfect systems, learning is as essential to mission success as production and delivery activities. A systems approach to learning recognizes the complexity of systems and considers them together with their interfaces and interactions as a whole. The performance of the system is more than the performance of the individual components—none of the individual parts can do what the whole can do. How do you know what to change when the whole is not working?

Most successes and events occur because many managers do not truly understand their organization. Frontline workers create value, often in spite of clunky organizations and subsystems. With that in mind, this poster session will illustrate a “collective mental model” of H&OP that is useful in both 1) building and aligning a system structure for success at the sharp end, and 2) refining that system’s reliability, safety, and resilience in response to opportunities and failures. This means that monitoring and analyses of human performance, especially in the workplace, must adopt a holistic perspective, looking for context and leverage—understanding interactions with other parts of the system and other goal-oriented systems before realigning the system.

This poster session will attempt to educate the learner by introducing the fundamental principles of the following aspects of SYSTEMS LEARNING:

•    Systems, Complex Systems, Systems Learning, Systems Thinking, Mental Models, and Leverage
•    The concept of emergence in human performance systems
•    How systems thinking explains the difference between work-as-done and work-as-planned
•    Why understanding success and failure in complex systems requires more than linear cause-and-effect thinking
•    How mental models influence the management of successful human performance in the workplace, and the analysis of and response to events and adverse trends
•    The three phases of SYSTEMS LEARNING