Why you should stop
investigating and start
learning

The conventional approach to investigation limits the opportunities for meaningful learning and action. Investigations only unveil 'known knowns' and things that can't be hidden. Effort is wasted because you don't find the real causes of workplace issues. A shift from investigation of wrong-doing to the process of Resilimap Learning Teams will enable you to discover, through curiosity and enquiry, how work is really done and why people don't follow rules and methods which simply don't work.

Understanding normal work

Through the Art of Works' Enabling Safety lens, your employees' capacity to adapt, learn and contribute becomes a critical resource for you to harness. It reveals how work is actually done, allowing you to develop powerful and cost-effective solutions that improve overall work performance, efficiency and safety. Learning Teams is a key mechanism to engage with frontline staff, and then enable your strategy development teams to understand the demands of normal work and how these demands can best be managed.

People are a solution
to harness

Through their on-the-job experience, frontline employees develop the knowledge of where challenges, sensitivities, dependencies, variabilities and good practices exist. The Learning Team method enables people to contribute their observations on how their work happens and their solutions for how it can be improved. Resilimap Learning Teams method draws on Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry, where learning is not limited to identifying and preventing failure, but focuses on success and increasing successful outcomes.

How does a Learning Team
work?

We work with your people to build their capacity to understand and learn from normal work, successful work and unwanted events. Engaging with your frontline employees, we use their expertise to see the work through their eyes, identifying what helps and what hinders them. We use their perspectives to gain vital insights into transactional, behavioural and organisational business conditions that can be resolved and improved.

The Resilimap Learning Teams method follows three phases: Discovery, Analysis and Ideation. It uniquely integrates research, evidence, technology, artificial intelligence and human performance to reveal insights that deliver sustainable, resilient work that is safe and productive.

Discovery

We are experts at being the fly on the wall. Our observation and discovery methods ensure we can see what is happening in the workplace without interfering with it.

Art of Work deploys cutting edge technology such as Google Glass and AI to provide deep insights into the real nature of work. We unearth secret adaptations and workarounds, and why workers must do this to meet demands within the capacity they have.

In collaboration with Google, Art of Work deploys Google Glass as a primary tool for our learning teams. Through Google Glass, Learning Team enquirers can see through the eyes and perspectives of those doing the work. Enquirers can see the real-time frontline experience, recording video and audio, and having two-way interactions with operators.

Analysis

Discovery delivers the information our consultants need. Analysis involves a filtering process where information is allocated to themes that inform important ideas: when work is difficult, what makes it successful, and what helps and hinders good performance.

Ideation

Our process utilises the proven human-centred design method from the Stanford Design School. We focus on ideas, not actions. Those ideas come from the experts who work together: those who design the work and those who do the work.

Solutions guided by research

Sidney Dekker

We are guided by Dekker's work, shifting from human error being the source of unwanted events, to understanding human factors and what enables human performance.

Humble Inquiry

Edgar & Peter Schein work on Humble Inquiry - the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions about which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

Work-as-imagined vs Work-as-done

Hollnagel and Woods (1983) proposed a distinction between the system task description (work-as-imagined) and the cognitive tasks (work-as-done). The distinction between WAI and WAD also played a role in the early discussions about resilience engineering, for instance in the first symposium 2004 as documented by Dekker (2006).

Human-Centered Design

Design Thinking created by IDEO and taught by the Stanford Design School is human-centered design. Design Thinking consists of three phases. In the Inspiration Phase, you learn directly from the people you are designing for, immersing yourself in their work and coming to deeply understand their needs. In the Ideation Phase, you make sense of what you learned, identifying opportunities for design and prototyping possible solutions. In the Implementation Phase, you bring your solutions to life and then to market. Your solution will be a success because you’ve kept the very people you’re looking to serve at the heart of the process.

Resilience Engineering

In systems of the fourth kind the anticipation includes the system itself – not only in the sense of monitoring itself or learning about itself, but considering how the world responds or changes when the system makes changes, how these responses may affect the changes, and so on. This is the recursive type of anticipation, and represents the pinnacle of resilience management.