From Theory to Practice: The Power of HOP and Continuous Learning 

[00:00:10] Mallory Hendry: Hello everyone and welcome. I'm Mallory Hendry, Content Specialist Manager with Canadian Occupational Safety. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar, From Theory to Practice, The Power of Hop and Continuous Learning. Today we're joined by Sylvain Ricard, Director of eLearning Services at Safe Contractor and Iqbal Brar, President and Principal Consultant at IQ Safety Solutions. Sylvain has more than 30 years of experience in IT, digital learning and operational leadership, and leads the team responsible for designing accessible multilingual courses tailored to the needs of contractors and clients alike. Iqbal brings over a decade of experience from working on construction sites across Canada to safety leadership roles on billion-dollar infrastructure projects. Today he partners with organizations to strengthen their safety programs, enhance performance, and build practical systems that support lasting change. Together our hosts will cover a lot of ground around how organizations can build a culture of continuous learning, something that's more vital than ever in today's workplaces and that supports human and organizational performance in daily work. At the end of the presentation, Sylvain and Iqbal will participate in a question and answer period, so be sure to type any questions you have into the Q&A box within the webinar software. I'll turn things over to our hosts now to begin the presentation. Take it away.
 

[00:01:30] Sylvain Ricard: Thank you, Mallory. So I'm Sylvain Ricard. And the first part, Iqbal and I are very happy and honored to have you in this webinar. The first part of today's webinar will be led by Iqbal, and I will have the honor of presenting the second part of the webinar. So as mentioned by Mallory, if you have any questions during the webinar, just go on the Q&A session, enter your questions, your question and submit it and at the end of the conference we will answer to the question. So it is therefore my pleasure to give the floor to Iqbal who will introduce his company.
 

[00:02:17] Iqbal Brar: So thanks, Sylvain. Good afternoon everyone, just wanted to start by saying thanks for everyone who took time out of their schedules to attend today's session, we really appreciate it. Just a little bit of information about IQ Safety Solutions. So we're a health and safety consulting firm and we help clients from across the country with basically whatever health and safety needs they may have. So with our background working in multiple provinces, we're experts at navigating any jurisdictional legislation and making sure that the solutions we provide are tailored to each jurisdiction. And we specialize in outsourced safety management, systems development, health and safety audits, and serious incident investigations, whether that's from managing them on-site or remotely. So, Sylvain, I'll give it back to you to talk about Alcumus.
 

[00:02:59] Sylvain Ricard: Yeah. So, Safe Contractor is Canada's leading contractor management and compliance solution. So, we help companies protect their people, keep operation running, and focus on what they do best. So, thanks to the largest network of trust, contractor, and innovative tools that makes compliance simpler. So, together with our clients, we are building safer, stronger, and more successful businesses across Canada. You can see here the agenda Iqbal and I will cover today. So we both hope that the information shared with will be useful to you. So without further ado, I pass on on Iqbal. Thank you very much.
 

[00:03:46] Iqbal Brar: So folks, what we wanted to chat about here at the start of the first portion of the presentation is the myth of the perfect worker. Now, this is from the lens of the human and organizational principles, aka HOP. So you're going to be referring to HOP a lot as we discuss those things. So next slide, please. Now, where we wanted to start is I wanted to introduce you to Rick. So Rick's been in the trade for over 20 years. This is the guy that everyone wants on their crew. He shows up early. His paperwork is always in order. He follows procedures to the letter. He's never had a recordable incident. This is the guy, right? Supervisors love him, new workers are told, hey, watch how Rick does it. This is who you want to, you know, who you want to strive to be. Now, when we talk about Rick, he's the perfect worker, at least on paper. But the thing is that Rick doesn't exist. Not really, and definitely not all the time. Because humans don't operate like that. Not in construction, not in manufacturing, and generally not in life either. Next slide, please. So the real Rick, you know, once again, real Rick still has that 20 years of experience and he cares about how his, you know, how he performs his work and the crew that he works with. And most of the time, Rick works safely because at the end of the day, he wants to go home safely and he wants his crew to go home safely as well. But sometimes there's issues. You know, the delivery is late and he's behind schedule. Sometimes the tool goes missing. Sometimes the site plan changes at the last minute. And sometimes the guardrail is down and he thinks, I'll just be up there for two minutes. So what Rick does is he adjusts, he adapts, and he makes hundreds of micro decisions every day to keep the job moving. And most of the time, things go right, because Rick, like most workers, is a problem solver and somebody who takes pride in their work. Next slide, please. And when we talk about Rick, this is the worker that HOP was built around. It's not a mythical perfect robot, but a real person who sometimes takes shortcuts, navigates changing conditions, makes decisions based on what seems right in the moment, and wants to do a good job even when the system around him isn't perfect. So HOP doesn't pretend that we can eliminate all human error, it recognizes that humans will always be valuable. So our systems should be designed to anticipate, support, and learn from that reality. Next slide please. So what we want to do here in this next section is that now that we've met Rick, I want to look at a day where something didn't go right and explore how we might respond from a traditional safety perspective to a perspective that takes HOP principles into consideration. Go to the next slide, please. Thank you. So, you know, in this scenario, one day Rick is installing flashing on a commercial roof. He's wearing his fall protection as required, but the anchor point is awkwardly placed and restricts his movement. To finish a small detail near the edge, he unclips just for a second. Now a spotter sees him and reports it, no one gets hurt, but as we know, technically that's a violation. So we're going to get a poll that pops up here just to ask you folks a question. And what we're looking for is, you know, in your organization, what's the typical response to an incident under similar circumstances? Do you reprimand the worker and document it? Are you asking what made sense to them in the moment? Are you reviewing relevant safety policies with the team? Or, you know, I'm not sure, it depends, need some more information. If you folks could take a few moments to answer those, and we'll just go over it and kind of see where companies are at this place, or at this time, sorry. I'm just looking here. You know, so looking at the results, we have 19% that talked about reprimanding the worker and documenting it. And there's no wrong answers here, folks. You know, there's ways that we can do it from the HOP perspective, and there's ways that we traditionally do it depending on the circumstances, all the answers make sense. But the second question which says, or sorry, the second response which talks about ask what made sense to them in the moment is one of the HOP principles that we're going to see. So great to hear that folks are already doing that. When it comes to reviewing the relevant safety policies with the team, once again, it's not a wrong response. It makes sense to do that in certain places and it makes sense to go over those and make sure that everyone's still aware of it. And then on the I'm not sure it depends, that's fair answer as well as you know maybe you need some more information. It's going to be dependent on is this the first time the individual has done it, have they done it multiple times. But it's great to see you know we are seeing some responses there that are in alignment with HOP. We could jump to the next slide. So when we talk about responses here we're looking at safety version one which is more in alignment with traditional safety. So what we see here is the text block traditional response. We locate the human failure and we correct the human. You got Rick written up. He's sent to retraining. The file is closed. We can show on an incident report. You know, we dealt with it. It's been closed out. The rules are reinforced, but nothing in the system changes with this response. We go to the next slide, please. Now, safety version two, which focuses on those HOP principles, really, you know getting behind understanding and learning we're not letting Rick off the hook but he is brought into the process he explains the anchor placement issue the team learned something they didn't know before an improvement is made and Rick comes out of it feeling trusted and ultimately the system gets stronger as well and hopefully we don't see the same thing because we've fixed that that a real issue that's been causing this next slide please now this is ultimately the same mistake but what we're talking about and really what we're getting at in this presentation is if we apply a different mindset to it, safety to mindset, you know, the HOP mindset, we're starting to get some different responses to how we deal with this. So from blaming the person to try and understanding the context, you know, from focusing on the rules being broken to focusing on why those rules were broken, stopping at what happened versus asking what made it make sense in that moment, you know, going from that retraining or discipline side of things to more system feedback and improvement. And unfortunately, sometimes leading to a fear of speaking up versus hopefully fostering an environment where trust and openness is what the workers feel. So what we get out here is this is a turning point between only managing people to also managing the system. You get the next slide, please. So once again, looking at this from, you know, from the HOP perspective, when we talk about error is normal, Rick's been at it for a long time. You know, he is an experienced worker. But as we know, even experienced workers can still make mistakes. And when we start to blame the individual, what we're doing is we're targeting the symptom as opposed to the actual system there. You know, in Rick's mind, at that time, that decision made sense. You know, there was pressures there, whether it was from a time perspective or the system wasn't working. So it reveals opportunities where we can actually see system improvements. and one that you know, if we go through those efforts, if we put the time in, you know, one that results in trust being something that the employees feel when bringing up these sorts of issues. So it shows that, you know, realistically, depending on how we respond, it can either shut down learning or it can really open the door to it. Next slide, please. So what we want to look at here now is to go a little bit deeper into the actual, sorry, into the... principles themselves. So once again, we'll kind of use Rick as our lens here, but we'll take a look at what each principle means, how it applies to Rick's situation, and what that means for real world work. And what the goal here is to help you recognize where these principles show up in everyday decisions. So the first principle, we touched on it before, but basically in HOP, it says that error is normal. So mistakes can happen. And even to those individuals that we trust the most. In this situation, Rick unclipped briefly, not because he was being reckless, but because he was adapting to a constraint in the environment. And instead of him focusing on compliance alone, asking what made that seem like a good idea at the time, starts getting to, you know, what did he have to do to adapt? And are our systems, do we have the right systems in place to allow, you know, the work to be done without error? When we talk about blame fixes nothing, I'm sorry, blame fixes nothing. When something goes wrong, it's really tempting to look for someone to blame. But unfortunately, sometimes if we jump right to discipline or only use discipline, it stops the story too early. We don't really get to the point where we end up understanding what are those system failures or what was the thought process that led to the individual making that decision. So if we write the individual up, if Rick gets written up right away, unfortunately, the learning ends there. And others might stop sharing information about, you know, those things that have happened or those near misses that they've been involved in as well. So instead, we want to really respond with curiosity as opposed to blame right off the bat. Now, when it comes to context drives behavior, people don't make decisions in a vacuum. You know, Rick made his choice based on time pressure and poor anchor placement. You know, how folks think the work is going to go versus how it actually goes is two different things. We have lots of things that happen throughout the day that can change that. We talked about some of them before, you know, tools not showing up, deliveries being late, so on and so on. So supervisors should really be asking what was going around. Sorry, what was going on around you when this happened? And when you understand the context, you're better able to improve the system that shaped that behavior. Now, the fourth principle is learning is vital. And sometimes we don't. um you know we often wait until somebody gets hurt to really start digging in deep but near misses and everyday work provide valuable information now this also applies to things that have gone well you know asking why did this go well can unlock great information right so um you know rick's incident here gives us a chance to improve the anchor layout and our planning ultimately things like using end of day huddles or engaging in learning teams to get down to the system level after an incident has happened go hand in hand with this principle. And the fifth one is how you respond matters. So the way that we respond when something goes wrong either builds trust or breaks it. If Rick's supervisor responds with curiosity and partnership, Rick's going to stay engaged. But if you respond with something like you're an idiot or right to punitive off the bat, well, that's going to erode trust and future risks are unfortunately going to go underground. We may not hear about them. We may not see them until unfortunately it's too late. Next slide, please. So when we talk about HOP, it isn't a checklist or a binder. It's just a way of seeing work differently. So it's a way of seeing people as the solution. It's a way of seeing deviations as signals, and it's a way of seeing incidents as learning opportunities. So you can really start using this lens immediately without really needing any permission or perfection to it. It's about applying these principles that we talked about. You know, a lot of the companies that I've worked with, some of these principles are already in place, but it's about looking back and seeing, you know, are all of them in place? Or do we have, you know, have we trained folks to be able to, you know, react curiously off the bat? So it doesn't mean that folks aren't already doing this. It might just be an opportunity that maybe there is a principle here that isn't applied as well as well as it could be. Next slide, please. Now, any time we introduce a new way of thinking, especially one that challenges traditional safety practices, such as saying that zero incidents is unrealistic, it's natural to hear some pushback. Now, I can tell you, speaking from my own experience in my past career as a, you know, in the power line utility industry, this was something that was adopted by the company that I previously worked for. They called it the capacity model. It had the five HOP principles built into what they were doing. And when they started telling clients that we don't believe that zero incidence is realistic, there was a fair amount of pushback. There was a lot of individuals saying, well, that's part of our ethos and that's part of our goal. But in discussing these things, in talking through what this actually means, that we're not looking for incidents to happen. And we're just saying that, you know, we need more capacity to stop those incidents from becoming worse incidents, we did get through those individuals. But there was a lot of these misconceptions that I'm going to talk about in those conversations. So we want to look at, you know, what are those things, and try and offer a clearer view of what it's really about. None of these are dumb comments or anything like that. They're valid concerns. And once again, it's things that pop up a lot when talking about HOP. Go to the next slide, please. You know, one of the ones we hear is that this is just another safety buzzword. We've seen BBS, lean safety, zero harm, and now you're saying HOP. But it's not one of those flavor of the month programs. Like we said, you know, as mentioned multiple times, it's a lens. It actually comes from decades of human factor research and real world experience in high risk industries. So it's not about throwing away any of the old tools. It's just about updating the toolbox to match how work actually gets done. When folks say that HOP is anti-rules and anti-compliance, HOP just recognizes that rules don't always match field conditions. When people break a rule, the goal isn't to look the other way. It's to understand why that made sense in the moment and what that tells us about the system. So rules still matter, but when people can't follow them, it's not rebellion. Sometimes it's a chance to improve the system. And the next one ties into that as well. It says, you know, if we don't discipline, people will do whatever they want. HOP doesn't mean that there's no consequences. All it is, is we're separating intentional recklessness from everyday error. So we still need to hold people accountable. But we're just saying that, you know, not we don't want to look at punishing people for necessarily being human. You know, realistically, how we respond helps people decide whether they want to stay engaged or check out. So we still have consequences. We just use them wisely as opposed to as a reflex. When we talk about we don't have time for all this learning. Really, it's not about adding 90-minute minutes to your day. It's about using that time that you already spend on things like investigations, retraining, rework, in a way that actually prevents repeat issues. So if a 10-minute chat at the end of a shift can uncover more insight than something like a formal root cause analysis weeks later, there's value in doing that 10 minutes. Spend 10 minutes upfront learning versus 10 minutes reacting later. And the last one is, you know, we've never had a serious incident. Why do we need to change the way we're looking at things? It's one of those, if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of mentalities. And as a lot of us know, is the absence of incidents actually doesn't necessarily mean that it's a sign of, you know, a safe workplace. Maybe it's a sign of luck, or maybe just these issues haven't surfaced yet. Maybe folks aren't comfortable talking about those near misses. But what we want to do with HOP is that it helps us find those weak signals early before they actually end up becoming real problems. Next slide, please. Now, jumping into this last section here, what we want to focus on is actually practical actions. So these aren't theoretical. These are things that you can start doing today to bring HOP principles to life. And what I want to do is break it down by each principle and give you clear examples of how you can apply that in your own workplace. Next slide, please. So the first HOP principle is error is normal. So one of the things that can be done is building capacity to prevent serious harm. What this means is that if we can identify critical tasks where mistakes could cause a serious consequence, things like energized work, fall protection, if we start to ask, can the system absorb a mistake in this type of work? Is there any backups or fail safes? Could a single error lead to a serious harm? And if the answer is yes, then we want to look for ways to add redundancy. You know, can we add additional spotters into this situation? Can we put some physical barriers up? Are there any backup checks? Maybe somebody coming by and taking a look. But this is a principle, once again, using my past there. This was something that really took off with the organization that I previously worked for. The organization there had introduced something that they called the capacity model, built around, you know, making sure that there was capacity to prevent serious harm. And one of the key components of that capacity model was having sticky conversations. And what sticky conversation STKY was, the actual language was, what's the shit that can kill you? And what the company would do is they taught the supervisors to say at the end of every hazard assessment discussion, ask the crew here, what's the shit that can kill you? And the purpose of that was to find out, you know, A, have we identified all those critical risks that are part of this task that we're doing? B, do we have controls in place for it and then see. do we have capacity for failure in case something goes wrong? So there was a huge amount of buy-in with that, but it was a very simple, very, you know, using some very good language that resonated with the field crews. It was something that really took off and started to see some real examples of folks thinking that, do we have enough capacity here to build, you know, to stop that serious harm from occurring? You can do things like, you know, add error traps to job briefs. Sorry, job briefs. So this is, you know, asking questions like, where are we likely to slip up today? What changed from yesterday? You know, this goes to normalizing that error is expected and something we can prepare for. And if we can teach teams to recognize when things feel off, whether that's an unusual sound, a hesitation, just feeling that something's not right here. We want to give people that language that things like, let's check that again. you know, before we move ahead, just so that, you know, we can build in their signals that hopefully catch weak points before incidents actually occur. Next slide, please. When it comes to blame fixes nothing, what we can do is we can coach supervisors to pause before reacting. You know, sometimes our instinct is often to react. You know, we want to correct the behavior, we want to write somebody up. But if we can start coaching supervisors to pause and ask, What were you trying to achieve? What made this seem like a good option at the time? You know, those types of questions, if we can give some training, if we can make that part of that, make that part of part of their vocabulary, then really we start getting to that place where we're getting away from blame and we're trying to look at, you know, understanding the context. We can have, you know, focused debriefs. So at the end of the day, asking folks what made that, what made the job hard that day? you know, what usually works here? What was different? What could we have done next time? And really, when we're talking about these types of incidents that happen at, you know, at safety meetings or otherwise, we want to make sure that we're talking about the system issues as well, right? Reminding folks that this isn't necessarily about Rick, it's about what was happening around Rick. Next slide, please. From the context drives behavior perspective, if we can start asking about constraints and pre-job briefs, once again, creating that culture where workers are talking about the real barriers. Hey, we don't have the right tools. We're working around other trades. It's creating issues. There's a lot of tight deadlines here right now. We're feeling a lot of pressure to rush. You know, once we start getting that as part of the conversation, what we can do is start asking them for help for how we get ahead of these things or start planning for how we'll get ahead of these things so that workers aren't going to those unsafe choices. Well, one of the things that I know a lot of folks do already, but something to be mindful of is, you know, reviewing those procedures against field conditions. Walk the job with frontline workers and ask, how do you actually do this? Compare what's written in the procedure to how the work is actually done. And really, outdated or unrealistic procedures can create risk. So as a manageable way to do it is maybe focus on those critical tasks first. When we talk about training, once again, if we can sow supervisors to learn, you know, to spot things like production pressure, design flaws, resource constraints, things that they're already taught, but from the lens of safety as well, you might get a better understanding of why, you know, the whys behind those actions that workers are doing. Next slide, please. Learning is vital. If you can start doing micro learning reviews after work, so taking five to 10 minutes at the end of the job task, what went well? What didn't? What did we have to adapt? Doing this regularly is going to build habits of reflection and is really going to start revealing those weak signals before they become problems. If we can capture and share those small wins, hey, what went well today? Let's talk about it. Why did it go well? Those are great opportunities to get people to start getting involved in, you know, learning from success. Using things like lesson learned templates, you know, at the end of a job or maybe at the end of the week, what went well? What challenges came up? What should we try next time? It really starts... setting us up that we'll see those patterns across job sites. And once again, if, you know, something does go wrong, going to the what made sense at the time types of questions, what else was going on, and how did the system contribute, just to see, you know, that we're actually looking at the right things and making sure that we're putting system improvements in place. And the last one, next slide, please, is about how we respond. So if we can train our supervisors to remain calm, you know, and have curious reactions. you know, getting to a place where they're asking with what were you trying to do? What made this feel like the right decision? Then we're hopefully getting to a place where people are comfortable bringing things up. And you can do things like role play and supervisor training to build this muscle. These are things that, you know, do need do need tangible training to become part of their regular routine. Building a thank you first kind of culture. So when somebody brings something up, hey, thanks for bringing this up. Even if it's a complex or uncomfortable issue, it starts to set that tone for that reporting concerns is valued and finally you know making sure that that follow-up is visible if somebody if somebody brings something up close the loop it's not always easy to fix a system issue right off the bat so but at least give them some information on where you're at with it you know it's been um it's been taken to the next level we're going to discuss it in the committee meeting just letting them know really builds that um that trust in them that when concerns are brought up they are they are addressed and last slide please And just before I pass it over to Sylvain, just the last point here is just, you know, HOP doesn't require a big launch. It actually just starts with one shift, one question, one better reaction. And it really can apply to any company, whether it's a team of five or a company of a thousand. The path forward is the same. You just see people as the solution and not the problem. You see system issues. You build trust. You learn quickly and you act wisely. Sylvain, I'll pass it back to you.
 

[00:27:39] Sylvain Ricard: Yeah, thank you, Iqbal, for that very interesting first part. So as announced previously, it is my honor to present the second part of the conference where I will put the emphasis on how the continuous learning can help your organization to reach HOP principles. So I recall you that if you have any questions, please submit them on the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom, and Iqbal and I will answer questions at the end of the conference. So. Why learning matters in HOP? So let's talk about that. So at its core, HOP is about understanding that people are fallible and systems are complex. So why is learning so critical? So first mistakes should never be seen as endpoints. So they're not the finish line, there's opportunity. So every error gives us valuable insight into our work. actually happens versus how we think it happens. So when we treat mistakes as learning moments, we improve the processes and prevent repeat issues. So again, near-miss are just as important. So there are signals that something in the system isn't working as intended. So instead of ignoring them because nothing bad happened, we should dig the deeper. So near-miss reveals gaps in our defense before they turn into serious incidents. And finally, learning builds trust and resilience. Iqbal already talked about that. So when people see that the organization responds to mistakes with curiosity instead of blame, trust grows. And with trust comes resilience, the ability to adapt and recover when things don't go as planned. So a learner culture makes us stronger, safer and more effective. So in HOP, learning isn't optional. It's the foundation for continuous improvement and organizational success. So by embedding HOP into e-learning or learning, organizations foster a culture of learning, resilience, and continuous improvement. So making safety and performance enhancement part of everyday work. But how learning contributes efficiently to HOP? There is many ways to contribute. So first one is by having a scalable access to HOP principles. So by widespread dissemination, more and more the organizations are spread across geographies and departments. So by ensuring consistent understanding of core principles like error is normal and context drive behavior, that helps contribute to HOP. And also the on-demand learning. Employees can access HOP content anytime reinforcing the key concept and when they are most relevant to their work. Another way to contribute is to reinforcing a system thinking mindset. So, it could be by interactive simulation and case study based on scenario that helps learners explore how organizational systems influence human behavior, shifting focus from blame to understanding systemic cause of error. Again, that's an element that involves bringing also microlearning that It could be any time in the day or during the 10-minute shift huddles. Those are short targeted lessons that can reinforce HOP principles like building capacity for failure and learning from everyday work. We can also support the operational learning by introducing guides and you know learning in fact learning can introduce and guide teams through the practice of learning teams. So structured conversations that explore how work is actually done and how to improve it. So we can also implement feedback loops where digital platforms can collect insight from the learner, helping organizations to refine the processes and identify emerging risks. So it's also important to measure cultural shifts. So analyze the engagement by in the platform, you can get the data from those platforms on the participation, comprehension and behavioral change. So it helps leaders to assess how deeply HOP is being adapted. So the sharing are small. It's very important to share small wins and learning from what went right and not just what went wrong. So the last element is the customization for organizational context. So by tailoring your content, you can adapt it to reflect specific operational environment, making HOP principles more relatable and actionable for different roles and industries. So before we go to the next slide, we'd like to do a quick pause. Okay, think about your organization. So when you hear the word training, what's the first purpose that comes to mind? So I will let you answer. So that's interesting. So for sure, like for the other poll that we did, there is no wrong answer, but for sure you answered the one that is the most popular and the most important. To learn, what we should expect is to learn and improve together as a system. Yes, we need to pass on this, we have to meet compliance, that's true. We have to refresh the procedure and ensure that they are up to date. and to understand also real-world challenges. But if we act always to learn and improve everybody, the supervisors, the management, the workers, and work together as a system, that's the best way to have success. So connection with the previous slide, if we take a look at why this matter, okay? Many organizations train for the record and not for real results. So and that's exactly what HOP helped to close as a gap. Okay, so this slide is highlight the critical issue, the gap in traditional training. For years, many organizations have relied on a procedure-focused approach. So what does that look like? First, training is often done for the record, not for real results. So it's about checking boxes, meeting compliance and moving on. So the problem is that people live without truly understanding how to apply what they've learned in real world situations. So again, these programs tend to reinforce rules without context. Authorities are told what the rules are, but not why they matter and how they fit into the bigger picture. So without context, rules become rigid instructions instead of tools for making good decisions. And third, when something goes wrong, the respondent is often to blame the person. This creates fear and shuts down learning. People become focused on avoiding punishment rather than improving the system. So that's a recipe for stagnation, not growth. So now let's contrast that in a learning focus approach. Here training builds real understanding, not just memorization. So it equips people to make sound decisions in complex dynamic situations where the rule book might not have all the answers. So it also encourages reflection and system improvement. So instead of asking who messed up or what can we learn, you know, this mindset turns mistake into opportunities and foster a culture of continuous improvement. So the gap is clear. Procedure-focused training check boxes while learning-focused training builds capability with confidence and resilience. So if we want better outcomes, we need to close that gap. I'd like maybe to spend a few minutes about the learning technologies, because there are many technologies available. Not all of them are easy to implement, I agree, but there is stuff that can be done slowly, progressively. So to support HOP principle, learning technologies should align with its core philosophy, understanding human fallibility, promoting learning from error, and designing systems that support safe and resilient performance. So the best help to achieve principles is there is many of them. So there is learning experience platform where you can allow personalized contextual learning that adapts to the learner environment. So, and it can also... support learning from real-world scenarios and encourage self-directed learning, which is key to operational learning. We can also have systems to simulate or send error-based learning tools. So, there are many of them on the market. And why they help? They help you simulate. The simulation allows the learners to experience error-like situations in a safe environment and reflect on decisions. So... So, it reinforces the principle that errors are predictable and learning from them is vital. The learning team platform facilitates the operational learning through team-based reflection and problem solving and encourages the active listening, shared learning, and worker driven insight central to HOP. The other one I would talk is about the incident analysis. It's nice, it's very important to analyze, in fact, the incident that we get, try to prevent them for the future. So the DOOS platform will support the root cause analysis and feedback loops from incident and near misses and promotes learning from failure and system improvement rather than blame. Microlearning, I will not talk more about that because we have a talk, but by short learning, you can burst that. and reinforce key safety and performance behavior. And we also see more and more adaptive learning system who can be tailored content based on the learner performance and behavior. So it helps recognize individual variability and support learning in error-prone context. And for sure, we cannot, in 2025, forget about AI. Artificial intelligence now brings a lot of power in the different tools. It has to be used with, you know, we have to be careful using that, but it can help many stuff. It could be used in simulation environment, adaptive feedback, error pattern analysis, smart learning, etc. So it's very important and that will be part of our life more and more in learning world. I'd like to spend a few minutes also to share a customer story. In fact, instead of taking the example of one of our clients, I regroup what most of our clients have as a challenge and how they approach learning by getting inspired by the five HOP principles. So the challenge of a lot of our clients is to improve the security and the operational consistency across remote or distributed site while adopting HOP principle. So for sure, if I go back to the five principles to explain, error is normal. For sure, the clients, what our clients are doing, they use our solution to deliver e-learning and microlearning modules and also A lead instructor of learning and on common OHS topics. So these modules normalize error discussion and encourage reporting without blame. Talking about blame, the action people will take, they want to revise their incident review process to eliminate blame-centric language. So this reframing encourages open dialogue, surfaces systemic issues and leads to more effective corrective action. Regarding the context-driven behavior, some of our clients are deploying innovative technology. So it could be virtual mixed reality simulation to replicate high-risk scenario like lockout, tagout, fire safety or confined space entry. So these immersive experiences help workers understand how environmental factors influence decisions. They also often redesign their learning ecosystem to embed training into daily workflows. So this systemic shift made learning accessible and routine. Learning is vital. So our clients have access to report and dashboard to track training completion and correlate it with incident data. This helps identify patterns and adapt training content based on real-world feedback. And finally, regarding how you respond matter. Site managers should receive, that's my opinion, and I think that's the opinion of also many managers from our clients, site managers should receive courses on psychological safety, coaching, and empathetic leadership. This empowers them to respond constructively to incidents and foster a learning culture. That's very important. The result of these actions are numbers. and our numbers that you see here and a version which talk by themselves. So on our clients what we see as an improvement they see a significant reduction up to up to 60 percent in fact in safety incident within six to 12 months by implementing those actions. They also see a training compliance across remote site to up to 90 percent so that's the goal they try to reach and also up to 30 percent faster on board. onboarding for new hours. We know that this clientele is more, there is a lot more risk that they could have an incident because they don't know the environment, et cetera. So to onboard them quickly, efficiently is very important. And for sure, all those actions will improve the morale. The workers feel more confident and empowered, and it's also improved trust. So between the frontline workers and leadership. So, we can see clearly that implementing HOP principles in your learning practices will bring you a lot of benefits. You see here some testimony. So, it can change the way your worker will see you. It can change the way your supervisor or you as a leader will work with your employee as a system to prevent incident and accident. So, thank you for your attention. So, we will now move on to the question period. So, if you have not already done so, please submit your question by clicking on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. I will probably stop the sharing, but if we have to come back to the presentation, it will be my pleasure to do so.

[00:43:58] Mallory Hendry: Okay. We have a few questions that have come in where the attendees agree with your approach, but they're just asking for a little bit of your weighing in. So in the example, they said that they would definitely talk to Rick to find out what went wrong, but they get some pushback about why Rick didn't come to them first when he saw there was an issue. So they're a little concerned. Do they have a psychologically safe environment? And how can they engage Rick to raise the concern or the challenges instead of taking on the risk?
 

[00:44:31] Iqbal Brar: Sylvain, are you okay if I jump on that one first?
 

[00:44:37] Sylvain Ricard: You can go ahead.
 

[00:44:38] Iqbal Brar: Okay, awesome. So, yeah, my thoughts there, you know, I'd say the answer is kind of in the question in terms of the psychological safety of the workplace. I think it'd be important in that situation to kind of understand where the company is right now in terms of do workers currently feel, you know, safe or, you know, comfortable bringing those concerns up and then taking it from that perspective that if they, you know, if they don't feel comfortable bringing it up maybe giving them some insight if we're using HOP as kind of the background to it maybe giving some insight that this is the direction that we're going as part of this this you know we are looking for to not blame individuals we are training our supervisors to ask from a place of curiosity first as opposed to from a blame perspective so I think that might um you know if if if we do find that you know people aren't comfortable bringing it up that might help provide some information on the direction that the organization is going. And if you feel like from a perspective that the company is already there, once again, kind of informing folks of that HOP perspective and talking through what HOP needs, not only from supervisors, but also from the employee side of things, them bringing up concerns, them letting them know when something feels off or if there's a system issue with it. then I think at least you know at least both scenarios are met with providing education, with providing what the intent of this information is and ultimately trying to keep people from getting hurt. So that'd be my two cents on it.
 

[00:46:11] Mallory Hendry: That's great. Sylvain did you have anything to add or should we move on to the next question?
 

[00:46:18] Sylvain Ricard: We can move on.
 

[00:46:19] Mallory Hendry: Okay all right. Do you guys see more Canadian organizations adopting or being more open to hearing about HOP because this attendee says it seems to be a little bit more popular in the U.S. historically?
 

[00:46:32] Sylvain Ricard: I can start first maybe because sometimes what we see is maybe they don't adapt it as the HOP or they don't know that but basically the principle of it will be adapted and so that's what the clients are trying to reach. So it's not just to be popular as Iqbal mentioned just just because it's a trend, but more that learning from errors and instead of blaming, just trying to build on that. That's something people try to do to just have a system that helps improving, have a continuous improving element. So no, it's not just to adopt HOP clearly, but mainly the principle, it's something that people are looking for.
 

[00:47:24] Mallory Hendry: All right. Yeah...
 

[00:47:25] Iqbal Brar: And just to, if I could just add to that. It's funny the individual mentioned that the company that I used to work for, they were owned by an American company, and it was actually introduced through that company to all of the conglomerates within the organization. But with that being said, I can tell you at least from the power line utility side of things, when this started getting introduced, even companies like Hydro One, have now, you know, I did a conference recently with an individual from Hydro One, and they had actually started implementing HOP into their program too. So if it's not here already in Canada, in terms of, you know, everywhere, it does seem to be something that, like Sylvain mentioned, a lot of the principles are already being applied, but I think we're starting to see a shift towards people understanding it as, you know, as a program in itself as well, and it becoming more and more common, because I do see at least one session about it at each conference that I attend.
 

[00:48:21] Mallory Hendry: That's great. Okay. Someone else is asking, how does everyone learn together if there's a big push for online learning where people are sort of individually watching a video and answering the test? So what would you say to that statement?
 

[00:48:40] Sylvain Ricard: Well, in fact, yes, it's right that e-learning is really individual, but there is many ways to bring learning to the employees. But even e-learning will bring data that you can, after that, bring together to tell, okay, what concept has been understood, which one has not been understood, and then you can have group, you can have a group of your employees together and share the result of that. But there is more and more collaborative platform. We signed that current conference, a poll that was sent to to the department. It could be done also in a team session or a Zoom session with the employees and then talk about the answers. And so there is a different way to engage the employees while keeping e-learning because sometimes the theory will be done like that. But it's important to also encourage the discussion and the exchange between employees and the management.
 

[00:49:47] Mallory Hendry: All right. That's great as well. We also have a question here about strategies that you might know of that customers have used to roll this out specifically with senior leadership as they kind of need to be behind it to drive it forward. And this attendee is saying there's still sort of an old safety mindset out there. So how can we change that?
 

[00:50:11] Iqbal Brar: You know what, I think, sorry, sorry, Sylvain, I think first step is educating them on what HOP is. You know, it's true right now. It's not as much as it's becoming more common. It may not even be a concept that individuals are aware of at this time, but educating them first on what are those HOP principles. you know, educating them on ways that this could be implemented within your organization and really the recognition that from a resource perspective, it's not the most resource heavy type of type of rollout. I think those are good places to start. And then as with any other rollout is, you know, taking a look at like which how can you apply the various parts to your organization? Coming up with a plan, I can tell you for for a large organization, there was a fairly structured plan in terms of. you know, step one was educating staff about or educating leadership about what it was, then step two, you know, educating employees, then getting some training in place to teach them some of these concepts and how those things are going to happen. So I would say first is educate folks on what it is, get their buy in, give them some examples of how you could use it with your actual workforce, and then really start diving into what are some easy wins that we can get, and then, you know, building it further into like the system aspects, whether that's updating your own learning management systems or your existing training and all those various components that may go along with it.
 

[00:51:37] Mallory Hendry: Thank you and Sylvain did you have anything to add to that.
 

[00:51:40] Sylvain Ricard: no I think it was it was quite clear
 

[00:51:42] Mallory Hendry: Yes agreed. Okay, someone else is asking is there a clear separation and definition of what training is in HOP versus education?
 

[00:51:54] Sylvain Ricard: Well for sure education And it also comes to the other question where we talk about that. We have an indication to make understand the leadership and to the workers why to adopt HOP principle is important and where do we want to go with that new system or that new way to go. So that's where I can talk. That's the part of the education. Training after that will be really on real... incident that we get or the near miss or stuff that we can. So we can build on that, train the people on how to avoid incident in the future or how to prevent the future incident like that. So that's where the training will help prevent that while not putting the blame on the M3 who caused that incident, et cetera. So it's really the distinction. So to educate is more. for people to understand why it's important to implement the HOP training will be more to give them tools and to think about what the what happens and how to prevent that.
 

[00:53:03] Mallory Hendry: Okay, Iqbal, did you want to add anything to that?
 

[00:53:08] Iqbal Brar: No, I thought that was great.
 

[00:53:09] Mallory Hendry: All right. Yes. Another attendee says they are working on having these HOP discussions at morning meetings, but they'd like to know if you have any suggestions on how to get leadership to expand on that because it's starting to become a little too routine in some departments.
 

[00:53:27] Iqbal Brar: If I'm understanding the question correctly, my interpretation of it is that how do you get those, how do you make those conversations more routine because it sounds like the conversations right now are, or sorry, how do you get those conversations to happen because it sounds like the conversations are pretty routine right now. So if that's the right interpretation, I mean showing them, you know, Showing them the benefits of it, showing them how easy it is to have those conversations, showing them how much more engaged employees can be when bringing those conversations in. I think those are really for any supervisor who, which I think most of them are, is wanting to see less incidents happen and wanting to see better controls and things like that in place. I think the results really speak for themselves, but it's about, you know, first letting them see what that looks like and then it's not a huge lift for what they're already doing. And then it's supplementing that in their training, right? Supplementing it so that it does become a reflex that in those morning meetings that, you know, you're having those conversations. So if there's safety professionals on the team, that might mean, you know, that might mean going out with them and doing those conversations for the first bit and making sure that they're feeling comfortable in it. Because they're... You know, some of those new things can be uncomfortable for folks. Maybe they don't know exactly what the expectation is. But that's where I'd say is show them the results, show them how easy it is, and then help them build those muscles that get them doing that regularly through, you know, through making it something that the company expects them to do and making it something that's associated with their training.
 

[00:55:09] Mallory Hendry: Okay, that's great. We have another question here. Have you seen a reduction in all incidents or just the more serious ones? It is their understanding that HOP focuses on the higher potential events. Do you have any...
 

[00:55:26] Sylvain Ricard: I'm not really agree with that because it depends how you adapt it in your organization. I mean, you could use HOP also to prevent small incident or something that is maybe with less damage or whatever. But those incidents are still important to avoid in the future. So it's really the way you bring, because if you decide just to focus on the high risk incident or... you don't use all the capability of the HOP principle. I think you should, an organization should use the HOP principle to manage the small and the biggest incident and reduce all of them.
 

[00:56:14] Mallory Hendry: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And someone's asking if this approach works for smaller companies or is it more for the big ones?

[00:56:24] Iqbal Brar: I'd argue for both. Yeah, I think, you know, things like responding with curiosity, you know, how we recognizing that blame doesn't, you know, blame isn't fixing things, you know, recognizing error is normal. I don't think there's any companies that this doesn't apply to. And really, for those smaller companies, rollouts of these types of things, honestly, I would say would be much easier, right? So I would argue that it's for any size company. These principles apply to any industry, any type of... any type of organization and any size of company from what I've seen and what I believe.
 

[00:57:00] Mallory Hendry: Okay. And do you two recommend any literature about HOP that the attendees could check out?
 

[00:57:12] Sylvain Ricard: Iqbal, do you have any?
 

[00:57:12] Iqbal Brar: No, you know what? Unfortunately, when we were rolling this out in the company that I'd worked for, they you know, they inundated us with information just from their internal, from their internal teams and things like that. So that's where I learned a lot of this. I can tell you, if you if you search for the just as one resource, quanta capacity model, what they have is they have quite a bit of free online training that you can do to get an understanding of, of those five principles and, and of how it's been implemented into or how you can implement it into a company. So it is free. It is something that will give you a better kind of foundational information. But as for books right now, it's something that I got to do a little bit of research on. But I think that's a good free resource to kind of get started with.
 

[00:58:04] Mallory Hendry: Absolutely. Okay, we have a few minutes left. Do you want to end? We have a few questions here. What's the biggest mistake you see organizations make when they're trying to implement HOP? And then if you have any sort of first steps that an organization could take if they're maybe not ready completely yet, but they want to start moving towards this approach?
 

[00:58:25] Sylvain Ricard: I think one of the errors, you know, organizations could make is try to implement everything at the same time. I mean, it has to be implemented progressively, as I mentioned earlier, by educating first the management, but also the workers on the advantage of putting it, and then start start small and then it could be by a small group by a department implement it and then replicate that to another department so it becomes a culture in the in the organization so we have to go step by step to to get a success for that.
 

[00:59:03] Mallory Hendry: All right oh sorry Iqbal do you have anything else to add?
 

[00:59:08] Iqbal Brar: Yeah no no i think i think so they nailed it and i think you know a really easy one is just trying to build that culture of blame fixes, blame fixes nothing, right? So even if we can start there that we go from a perspective of curiosity, I think that's a really easy, easy first step.
 

[00:59:24] Mallory Hendry: All right, that's, that's great. That brings us to the end of our presentation. I just wanted to give a big thank you to our speakers for sharing their expertise with us today. And of course, to everyone in our audience for joining us and being here with us today. Keep an eye out for more upcoming webinars and enjoy the rest of your day.
 

[00:59:41] Iqbal Brar: Thanks, everyone.