ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the author's grounding role with Workplace Health and Safety Queensland which shaped aspects that were critical to his success stories. He shares his experience encountered in his health, safety and environment career. Learning teams are a powerful method to gain greater insights and understandings of everyday operations, whether an incident has occurred, or performance is not efficient or effective. Learning teams move the focus from error and blame to a more holistic, collaborative and systems thinking approach to failure. Emphasis is placed on the importance of operational learning and changing from a reactionary mode to more of a “learn and improve” approach. This is done by bringing workers and planners together to discuss how work really gets done, not how management thinks it gets done. Learning teams look at the complexity of failure and consider the possibility that it happens more from normal variability than from some anomaly or someone not paying attention.
