The Human Side of Safety - • Rethinking how we work, learn, and lead.

  Learning Review Format  – Human & Organizational Performance-Based Incident Review In high-risk environments like construction, incidents are rarely the result of a single bad decision. More often, they reveal how our systems, assumptions, and pressures interact with real-world work. This Learning Review format is grounded in Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) principles. It’s not about fault-finding—it’s about understanding how the event made sense to the people closest to it and using that understanding to improve the systems that support them. This review helps us: Learn from normal work, not just error Identify system weaknesses, not just human ones Drive improvements that are practical, respectful, and resilient Let’s focus less on “who failed” and more on “what can we learn.” So, let's begin   1. Incident Overview Date / Time / Location Project / Vessel / Department Type of Event Injury Near Miss Property Damage Environme...

  What to Do After an Incident: A HOP-Based Approach Rethinking Incident Investigations in the Construction Industry Ed Klein When something goes wrong in the field—an injury, near miss, equipment damage—our first instinct is often to ask: "Who messed up?" But as more of us in high-risk industries adopt the principles of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) , that question gets flipped on its head. The better question becomes:  "What made sense to the people involved at the time?" If you're in construction, you already know this isn’t easy work. It’s dynamic, unpredictable, and full of variability. Our people operate in high-consequence environments, often with incomplete information, changing weather, and evolving plans. So, when an incident happens, we owe it to our teams to go beyond blame and dig into how work is really done —not just how it’s written in the procedure. Moving From Blame to Learning Traditional investigations often focus on rule ...