From Compliance to Learning

Much like when a software company blames engineers for their service outages, the US Forest Service had a history of blaming the dead after accidents. A crisis of trust undermined communications and information flow resulting in an abysmal accident rate and a breakdown of the relationship between front-line workers and leadership. This talk explores field initiatives and leadership actions that changed the approach to learning along three key pillars: The leadership safety journey, field initiatives that worked directly with practitioners, and some of the research that underpinned the changes. Moving Gracefully from Compliance to Learning. Dr. Ivan Pupulidy @ LFIConf2023. youtube

He told a heart wrenching story about the US Forest Service’s original compliance-based frame for incident reports after firefighting aircraft crashes and how and why they changed to a learning based frame.