HOP Training
Our HOP Fundamentals and HOP & Learning Teams courses were the first in Australia and New Zealand. We have now grown to attract a global audience of safety professionals interested in learning the foundations of HOP.
Find a CourseWhat is HOP?
Human and Organisational Performance – or HOP – is a contemporary perspective on how we can improve work
It focuses on understanding the context and conditions of work, recognising the complex interactions between people and systems. HOP helps us to understand how humans perform and gives us a framework for building more resilient organisations.
Why has HOP emerged?
Burgeoning bureaucracy and increasing compliance demands have led many organisations to search for different ways of doing safety. Some organisations have even felt their safety efforts have made organisational performance worse while delivering no safety benefit.
HOP has developed as an operational philosophy based on the works of thought leaders such as Todd Conklin, Sidney Dekker, James Reason and many more. It takes the perspective that safety is just one of many emergent outcomes from work and focuses on making work better and building capacity to ensure success.
By taking this approach we can improve across a range of outcomes including quality, safety and productivity.
Benefits of HOP
The HOP approach identifies and amplifies the excellence that already exists within an organisation. Focusing on a deep understanding of the work from those who know it best, it optimises system conditions and, where possible, reduces constraints. Ultimately, the focus is on creating the conditions for success – not just to avoid failure. HOP in its very nature does not take a binary view of what is valuable and what is not in safety practice.
Rather, HOP:
- Leverages worker expertise to build a realistic picture of the operational context;
- Looks at normal work and capacity thresholds;
- Provides a platform to listen and learn from workers;
- Generates conversation around the 'real' issues (operator 'struggles');
- Seeks to understand the operational problems and successes;
- Uncovers problems that may be hidden or unknown;
- Efficiently generates insights to assist decision making;
- Uses worker expertise to develop effective and sustainable solutions to problems;
- Allows for transformative restoration;
- Engages and empowers the workforce;
- Provides the opportunity for an inclusive approach, with the ability to break down silos;
- Enhances what is working well; and
- Reduces or removes what is no longer useful.
Critically, HOP is an integrative process.
It requires a holistic approach that involves leadership, management systems, people and practices. HOP is about our conversations, about the way we treat each other, about listening and learning from those who do the work, and appreciating their depth of knowledge in the way operations run.
Organisations that have adopted HOP have experienced:
- Uncovering rich and relevant operational insights to better influence decisions at a leadership level;
- Getting a collective understanding of normal work, critical defences and capacity
- Greater engagement, accountability and empowerment of the workforce
- More productive responses and approaches to failure
- Innovative and applicable solutions for sustained work improvements
- Overcoming roadblocks and building systems that enable and support the work
- Enhanced performance across a range of measures
- Decluttering systems and processes for increased relevance in operations
- Reduced bureaucracy and more focused processes and work practices
Watch: What is HOP
Watch HOPLAB Founder Andy Shone, introduce HOP as an operating philosophy.
The Five Principles of Human
& Organisational
Performance (HOP)
Human and Organisational Performance is based on five principles that shape and influence the way organisations think, act, view success and respond to failure. These five principles are integrative and work together to change the way we think about work and how to improve it.
Discover the five principles
A tailored approach
Supporting every step of your HOP journey
Operational Learning
We guide organisations to develop and facilitate operational learning through a suite of tools and methods to understand how work is really done, including Learning Teams, Field Insights and Event Learning.
Explore Operational Learning
HOP Integration
HOP integration is an ongoing approach to understanding the complexity of both failure and success. This is in addition to the key focus of learning from normal work. We help organisations adopt HOP and operational learning through integration.
Discover HOP Integration
What are the differences between HOP, Safety II and Safety Differently?
We often get asked how the terms Safety II (Safety 2) and Safety Differently relate or compare to Human & Organisational Performance? There are a number of terms being used to describe different facets of what has been collectively referred to as the 'new view' of safety. While they have different origins, many of these terms have arrived in a very similar destination. The approaches and methods that are accepted, promoted or utilised by HOP practitioners would be equally useful for an organisation adopting a Safety II or Safety Differently approach.
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