2025 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 31st Annual Conference

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.