• Welcome to the Learning Teams Community

    BUILDING BETTER COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

    Learning Teams Community is brought to you by the authors of the book "The Practice of Learning Teams". Our goal is to support organizations and practitioners who want to learn and improve their safety, quality or operational excellence using Learning Teams. This support is offered with both free and paid commercial content.

    Learning Teams 101

    Learning Teams (from the original work of Dr Todd Conklin) is notable because it encourages organizations to obtain and consider different perspectives and angles to define a problem in a group context. The different perspectives that emerge from a Learning Teams group demonstrate that no one person holds all the knowledge needed to solve complex problems. Learning Teams involves facilitated engagement (a facilitator) with workers to understand and then learn from the opportunities that are presented by everyday successful work. Learning Teams allow both workers to learn and the organization to learn through gathering business intelligence to support successful everyday work in safety, quality and operational excellence.

    Learning From Everyday Work

    Operational learning "Blue line/Black line" exists in everyday successful work. Everyday Learning Teams involves a way to gather intelligence from the opportunities that are presented by everyday work for both workers and the organization. Workers have an opportunity with everyday learning teams to improve through an intentional learning process and better understanding of operational learning that occurs between work as planned and work as done. Everyday Learning Teams, recognise that learnings that workers gain from operational learning, happen in micro-changes or small amounts, daily.  Where as, organizational learning happens in macro-changes, being a more substantial amount of information, by analysing the business intelligence gained from everyday learning teams to determine if a further deep dive is needed by conducting a Management of Change or periodic Learning Team.

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Coming Soon - The Learning from Everyday Work Solution.

Like all good solutions, the needs of both workers and the organization are critical to gather business intelligence. This is not a tool. This is for workers to gain better learning about the variability and complexity of tasks they face everyday and for those operational learnings to be transparent to the organization as business intelligence, in order to support the improvement of the optimizing the capacity and resilience of the system. The first four methods of gathering this intelligence will include:

The 4D’s is the workers view of weak signals by using a “thinking frame” to capture worker narrative of everyday work from:
  • Situations, tasks, or processes that don’t make sense to the worker “Dumb”
  • Unusual or difficult tasks and processes for the worker “Difficult”
  • Changing or changed situations, tasks, and activities “Different” 
  • Risky tasks, processes, situations, or hazards “Dangerous”
A reflective practice to understand the daily variability that occurs between how we planned work and how the workday went.  “Where we had to make do?” using a thinking frame called STEP®.
Routine Work Soak time is a reflective practice for workers to look back over a period to make the variability visible to them, understand the weak signals that are present to reflect and learn from.
The STRM – Defense Capacity Assurance Activity extends the notion of WAI versus WAD (Blue Line/Black Line) by workers reflecting on everyday successful work and the presence of the Organizational Defenses and Worker Defenses when dealing with STKY’s (Stuff That Kills You) in a dynamic risk environment.
Book a time, to see the solution live!

ISBN: 979-8665374321

GOOD READING

The Practice of Learning Teams "The Book"

Learning and improving safety, quality and operational excellence. Written by Brent Sutton, Glynis McCarthy and Brent Robinson with foreword by Dr Todd Conklin.
“The Practice of Learning Teams” will become a powerful resource in changing the way organizations learn and improve their operations.  This book is easy to read and full of great concepts that can be used as soon as you read them.  I love a book where you read an idea in the morning and try the same idea that very afternoon.

Todd Conklin,  2020.


Buy The Book From The Authors

Our community podcast series "The Practice of Learning Teams" on Safety FM

Join us every week as we explore, learn and reflect on applying Learning Teams on the Safety FM podcast channel.