2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

~ Why don’t people just follow procedures?
~ Is there a pattern to how experts make real-world decisions?
~ How can we bridge the gap between Work-as-Imagined (WAI) and Work-as-Done (WAD)?
~ How can we help mentor novices to evolve into experts?
~ How can we improve our own decision making right now?

In this fast-paced, interactive, one-hour presentation, you’ll get practical answers to all the questions above.

They're all based on these four core decision making layers used by experts in high-hazard industries across the globe.

1) Explicit procedures (WAI) — How to do a task -- (“Step 1, Turn power off”)

2) General Guidelines / Rules-of-Thumb — What to do, but not how to do it -- (“Switch before fix”)

3) Universal Principles — How a system works, but not how to work it — (“Electricity takes the easiest paths to ground”)

4) Tacit Skill (WAD) — Unwritten knowledge in action -- (“I can solve this problem, but can’t explain how I do it.”)

One Deputy Division Director at a US Department of Energy Research Lab wrote… ”Before this workshop, I thought, ‘Procedures will protect the employee.’ Now I’m realizing that, while still important, not all incidents can be solved by procedures.”