According to David Hammons, organizational learning and reporting manager with Chevron, operational learning emerges when an organization learns from instances in which nothing goes wrong.
Specifically, Hammons said that Chevron's approach to operational learning "simply involves talking to the people who do the work. That should not be a revelation for anybody. It is critical for leaders and owners to accept that error is normal as they begin that "human and organizational journey."
"We must understand that blame does not fix anything, our responses matter and learning is vital," he said. "If we accept those things, we can then begin to think about how we learn."
Hammons noted that while leaders agree philosophically with that premise and understand it, they still often ask him what they should do, specifically.
"The answer is, you want to learn from your people. You have to actually go and find out how the work is done, because we have all of these extreme conceived notions about what we call 'the black line,' or the way things are supposed to be built. We've got procedures to follow and we've got processes in place."
But, Hammons said, there's more to the concept. "If you think those things are happening just the way you think they are every day, you are probably wrong." The only way leaders can find out about the way things really work is by talking to the people that actually do the work, he reiterated.
In addition to leveling-up communication with workers, there are a lot of different ways to learn.
Companies have meetings, dialogues and shift turnover discussions which, Hammons said, are all very important learning mechanisms. "But you have to ask yourself:
'How are we getting the information from these talks back to the organization to allow us to learn and improve?'"
Sometimes that learning and improving may just be locally important to the crew that is doing the work, Hammons admitted.
"And that is okay. Sometimes those lessons are really important to us, operationally, to better understand our risks and the hazards associated with work, to better understand how our safeguards are functioning and to be better able to engage with our people in that discussion about, 'Hey, we understand you are probably not doing it the way we think you are, every time.'"
"If we share that knowledge, if we have a way to propagate that knowledge throughout the organization, then we have an opportunity to do something," Hammons said, speaking as a member of a panel discussion at the 2022 Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, held recently in Houston.
Joining Hammons on the panel, Sandra Adkins, manager of safety culture, human performance and safety science with bp, observed that organizations are already "stretched and challenged" on a number of levels.
"There is always a struggle for resources and the capacity for investigating incidents," she said. "How are we going to do this investigative work for everyday work, too? Those are concerns that are real and need to be addressed."
Adkins stressed the criticality prioritization to best address these concerns.
"For us, it is really looking at the critical tasks that are in our work," she said. "There have to be difficult and collaborative conversations around prioritization. It needs to be approached together as a risk-based concept." It is essential to make sure findings, recommendations and learnings are effective in targeting issues and imbedding them in systems. "We need to take a robust look at that after the fact, and follow up," she said.
Adkins emphasized the additional need for a resourcing and capacity conversation, "especially as we get into the mindset of wanting to learn from successes, and not just from our failures and incidents. We want to know what is going well, and what helps us to feel safe that will protect us."
"They also need to make sure that we have the proper relationships with contracting partners and operators so we can have those successful conversations with them as well," Adkins concluded.
