2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

Part II
Safety comes as a by-product of high-performance. Effective teamwork, leadership and followership are key tenets of high-performing teams. Teams are successful when they understand, communicate and maintain a shared mental model to achieve a common, valued goal. However, teams take time to develop, and many organisations in high-risk domains operate in the context of teaming rather than teamwork. The subtle difference is that teaming is where short-term, ad-hoc groups come together to solve a particular task or problem compared to established teams. Teaming requires trust and psychological safety, both of which are critical to safe operations.

Many organisations do not invest in developing effective teams (including leadership and followership skills), much less the cognitive and interpersonal skills needed to facilitate and support teaming. This full-day workshop with Gareth Lock and Benjamin Goodheart is about you developing, in a psychologically safe environment, in which your personal boundaries will be explored through critical debriefs/reflections. You will find out how you really perform in a dynamic, uncertain, and ambiguous environment when you are under stress. And while there is serious learning to be had, there is no professional jeopardy, so it’s also great fun.

Both Ben and Gareth are experienced facilitators working in high-risk industries to develop excellence in teaming skills. The Johari Window (Open, Hidden, Blind, and Unknown) will be used as the framework to develop your competencies in teaming, and non-technical skills/crew resource management.

You will not have experienced a facilitated workshop like this before. It is where teaming skills come to life, and you will have so many takeaways and resources to help transfer this knowledge to your own workplace, irrespective of role/position.

“I asked for awareness around my personal blind spots, I gained much more.” - ICU Anaesthetist, Vancouver, CA.

“Previously, it took three days of training at the fireground to assess the team’s performance and areas for improvement. We did that in one day using the LAB.” Wildland Incident Commander, USA.

"The course is very introspective - be prepared to feel utterly unravelled but unconditionally supported at the same time!" – Director. Media Company, UK.

This workshop sits firmly in the HOP space: you will make errors, you will help each other learn because you will discover the system is massively flawed through experimentation and reflection, and as a team, you will achieve the goal of shared learning.