2018 HPRCT Conference

Member Meeting closing the 24th Annual HPRCT Conference. All conference attendees are invited and encouraged to attend this meeting.

Staff Rides, also called Event Analyses, originated in the Army and are a way to look at an event from multiple perspectives.  They provide a window into an organization through the idea that minor deviations, surprises, mistakes and recurring problems often reveal much about the state of the system.   In this workshop, we involve participants in an interactive demonstration of the Staff Ride process.  We begin with a discussion of using open-ended questioning, with HRO framing, to explore an event.  Then participants practice by questioning people, in different roles, who involved in an event, around an “interview carousel”.  We wrap up by coming back together and noticing that interpretations of what happened varies based on where people start in the interview carousel (1st interview shapes their line of questioning) and we share how observations can be assessed against a “mindful” maturity model to identify areas for improvement, referencing a “mindful” maturity model designed by Annette Gebauer gebauer@icl-net.de and Bert Slagmolen Bert.slagmolen@A13c.nl. 

During this presentation, Leaders will be introduced to how to model positive behavior and they will be provided tools to help learn to design and implement successful behavior-based talent retention and recognition programs so that a corporate culture that focuses on achieving long-term performance improvements, eliminating favoritism, and engaging the middle manager thus resulting in higher profits for the shareholders. Participants will learn the benefits of proactive programs and will explore the most “popular” recognition tools in use today and what the latest studies indicate about their effectiveness. 

It’s a business no-brainer that happy employees make better employees.  
 
But how do you get happy employees that deliver their best work on a consistent basis? 
 
And how do you create a Culture of Commitment in your organization? Further, how do you shift your workplace culture from “I have to do it or I’ll be in trouble” to “I want to do it because I believe in it”? Based on Bill’s best-selling book: “Green Beans & Ice Cream: The Remarkable Power of Positive Reinforcement”, this presentation explores how R+ Leadership ensures that your employees perform at their best. Not only will R+ Leadership attract and retain high-performance employees, it will also produce rapid performance improvement among low-performer employees. We will focus extensively on the mechanisms needed for successful behavior-based processes and consider areas that are often overlooked. 
Learning Outcomes: 
 
•             Learn the definition of Positive Reinforcement and how it improves culture, safety, quality, and customer service. 
•             Determine what types of employees you have: compliant, non-compliant or committed, and what drives each type 
•             Learn how positive reinforcement drives commitment and employee engagement, which translate to improved profits! 
  

This session is designed to provide an overview of the tenets of Safety Differently, including redefining how safety is defined, the role of people in the organization, and the focus of the organizations with respect to safety management. 

Current safety management approaches are based on outdated models of organizational management and human performance, some over 100 years old. No wonder while the world changes ever more rapidly, the safety profession is seeing diminishing returns for our efforts. Yet, we continue to press ahead, doing what we’ve always done, and getting what we’ve always gotten.  
 
This session will introduce a new model of safety management – Safety Differently. Based on decades of research and practice in high-risk industries, Safety Differently provides a new way to approach safety problems and a new set of tools for the safety professional. It is based on three basic tenets that contrast with traditional approaches to managing safety:  
 

1. Safety is defined by its presence (not its absence) 

2. People are the solution (not a problem to control) 

3. Safety is a top-down ethical responsibility (not a bureaucratic accountability to those at the top) 

 

To investigate how the wording of interview questions can unintentionally and unknowingly bias answers, how ‘leading’ questions cast doubt on the authenticity of the data collected, and how you can avoid this by asking ‘clean’ questions. 
 
The aim of this workshop is for you to learn and integrate the principles of Clean Interviewing and to develop your ability to design and frame clean questions during practice interviews. You will learn how to interview using Clean Language so your interviewees are given maximum opportunity to provide reliable information ‘uncontaminated’ by an interviewer’s framing, presuppositions, and metaphors.  
 
You will also learn a new process for validating the ‘cleanness’ of an interview thereby increasing the robustness of your methodology.  
 
Interview technique is vital in a number of research areas. However, the value of the data gathered depends on the quality of questions asked. 
 

Problem  
 
Because asking questions is so common, interviewers can be lulled into believing that interviewing is unproblematic and requires little specialist knowledge. Empirical research shows, however, that even a single word (especially a metaphor) or presupposition can materially ‘lead the witness’.  
 
Interviewee answers may then be subject to the ‘consistency effect’, the ‘acquiescence bias’, and the ‘friendliness effect’ (Podsakoff, MacKenzie & Podsakoff, 2003). Added to this, the potential for ‘priming’ and ‘confirmation bias’ by the interviewer (Oswald & Grosjean, 2004), can result in a low ‘signal to noise’ ratio at best, and compromised validity at worst.  
 
Solution  
 
Clean Interviewing, an application of Clean Language (Grove & Panzer, 1989), reduces unintended interviewer bias and protects the integrity of interviewee information. Clean questions keep interviewees focused on the research topic without restricting or leading them. It also provides a method for validating the authenticity of the data collected using a ‘cleanness’ rating (Lawley & Linder-Pelz, 2016). This is the only quantitative validity rating of its kind within both causal and academic interview methods.  
  
Aims & Outcomes  
 
The workshop will provide the research base and practical activities for participants to learn:  
 
(1) how bias is unintentionally introduced into an interview 
 
(2) how to use classically clean questions 
 
(3) how to construct contextually clean questions which maximize the collection of relevant information 
 
(4) how to use a cleanness rating instrument to assess the authenticity of the data collected.  
 
 
 
 
Skills & Activities  
 
Participants will:  
 

• Learn to distinguish between clean and leading questions based on real interview excerpts, allowing them to expand beyond ‘open-closed’ question framework previously learned.  

 

• Experience the felt difference between answering clean questions and those containing leading presuppositions and metaphors.  
   
• Learn and practice interviewing using clean questions.  
   
• Learn and practice using the cleanness rating instrument. 

 

 This eight-hour workshop will present a plain English approach to determining the causes of events based on ordinary logic and proven analytical techniques that may be applied in concert with any other causal methodology currently in use.  

Workshop content is directly relevant to “Learning Group” members, causal analysts, and those who review, approve and use their outputs.  After completing the workshop, participants will be able to apply the learning in their next day at work.

Appropriate emphasis is placed on: (1) why assigning “Blame” is inappropriate for causal analysis efforts of any kind; (2) why “Blame” is a ‘red flag’ indicating a seriously flawed analysis; and (3) how to avoid participating in the “Blame Game.”

This workshop is presented as a case study.

A number of specific analytical tools are also presented. Following descriptions of each tool, participants engage in group discussions and hands-on exercises that internalize the subject matter.
Appropriate emphasis is placed on: (1) why assigning “Blame” is inappropriate for causal analysis efforts of any kind; (2) why “Blame” is a ‘red flag’ indicating a seriously flawed analysis; and (3) how to avoid participating in the “Blame Game.”
The event scenario and background material are provided as the training unfolds throughout the day.

This workshop is for professionals whose current or near-term future duties involve:

• Dealing with the impact of consequential organizational events.
• Sponsoring, leading, supporting, or reviewing the output of Learning Groups assigned to analyze adverse events.
• Sponsoring, conducting, or reviewing root cause analyses of adverse events or their precursors.
• Managing or training event investigation teams of any variety.
• Assessing the effectiveness of event investigations.
• Managing the outcomes of event investigations.
• Managing or assessing corrective action programs.

 Defending the regulatory aspects of event investigations

This workshop is not for people who want to continue thinking that:

• Future events can be entirely prevented through increased focus on “Human Performance” and “Trending.”
• Causal Analysis is an appropriate tool for assigning blame.
• “Root Cause” is “Old Thinking” that is no longer valid.
• The use of “Learning Groups” is a fad that is not a valid investigatory approach.
• Event investigation is a well-defined science about which nothing new can be learned.
• There is a single right way to investigate events.
• For every consequential event there is one single root cause.
• Event consequences are not controlled by business decisions.
• Event investigation should be done mainly to satisfy outside agencies

(Note: This workshop complements the HRO staff ride workshop; both offer a different way of looking at and learning from events. ) 
 
This workshop was developed by Dave Wood’s Cognitive System’s Engineering lab at Ohio State.   We will demonstrate how to look at an event from a Resilience Engineering/complex system perspective, using a simulation inspired by a 2013 NASA incident in which an astronaut almost drowned during a spacewalk. Participants will assume multiple roles in carrying out and directing the spacewalk amid goals and constraints exploring how people make sacrifice decisions under messy conditions.  We will discuss how organizations can improve sense-making and decision making. 
 
Background: To fully understand system performance and how it degrades before and during an accident, it is crucial to be able to rationalize the small-scale behaviors of the practitioners closest to the accident in time and space (i.e., the sharp end). This is only possible by understanding how these behaviors are shaped by the pressures and constraints resulting from larger-scale decisions and actions of the blunt end. Chief among these is increased production pressure. Whether it is due to exploiting new technologies, creating more prescriptive policies and procedures, or leveraging past efficiencies to increase present and future throughput, this invisible force predictably contributes to changes in mindset, activation of buggy knowledge, changes in goal priorities, and changes in authority that can interact to degrade event detection, sensemaking, re-planning, and other macro-cognitive functions. But how can you see an invisible force?  We identify the most common ways that production pressure is expressed in the seemingly irrational adaptations of people throughout the system.  We will teach how these adaptations can be reconceptualized in terms of how sense-making and decision making occurred, which can then be traced back to the more global pressures and constraints. 
 
This workshop will be valuable for anyone interested in better managing complex system performance through applying the concepts of resilience engineering.     

Human Performance Improvement (HPI) enables us to work safer and more reliably.  
“To err is human...,” but does human fallibility doom us to failing over and over again? “Human error” is often attributed as the cause of events, whether we are talking about injuries, equipment damage, unit trips, environmental releases, etc. This leaves everyone wondering, “How can we reduce events caused by human fallibility?” For too long, there hasn’t been a good answer to that question.  
HPI is the application of principles and techniques specifically designed to reduce organizational events at all levels of the organization. This course will give you the information you a solid understanding of the HPI Error-Reduction Tools and examples of dynamic learning experiences to help people understand, practice, and retain those practices.   
Learning Outcomes: 

• Discuss and Apply a set of human error reduction tools in an Electric Utility context. Including: 
• Pre-Job Brief 
• 3-Way Communication 
• Phonetical Alphabet 
• Self-Check/TV-STAR 
• Post-Job Review 
• Stop When Unsure and Questioning Attitude 
• 2-Minute Rule 
• Procedure Use & Adherence with Place-Keeping. 
• Peer Check