Our search for a vice president is complete. Roy Harper was elected to serve as our vice president at our August 4th meeting. Roy has spent years as an outstanding secretary on our executive board. The secretary position does a great job to prepare someone to be vice president. Roy is a solid leader in our chapter and will be a great vice president. 
 
Unfortunately, our long-time membership chair, Amy Stonehill was unable to continue in her role on the executive board. A big thank you to Amy for her hard work in her leadership in our chapter over the years. I served as the membership chair years ago and I can tell you, Amy did an amazing job.
 
Loria Holden, Timber Products Company, has been appointed and approved for the membership chair role on our executive board. Loria is well qualified and has served as president of an ASSP chapter back east. Loria has also volunteered to lead WISE efforts in our chapter. If you haven’t welcomed her to our chapter yet, go ahead and do so. We are very fortunate to have Loria and her experience in our chapter.
 
We still have vacancies on our executive board. The biggest vacancy is the secretary position. This is a lot of work, but it does give the individual a great view of the mechanics of how our chapter runs. The other position is the COMT position. This executive board position works within the Chapter Operations Management Tool (COMT) online to make sure our chapter is doing the things we need to do to be a successful chapter. This is a great position for a new member on the executive board and helps guide the executive board in their efforts. The Chapter Operations Management Tool makes this an easier task. Please let me know if you are interested in either of these positions on our executive board.
 
The new availability of recorded content for visitors to our website has been a great resource. If you missed last month’s chapter meeting or can’t remember how the speaker answered a certain question, it’s still available to watch afterwards. This change in our online presence has expanded the value of our website to you and our community. Our July presentation by Nathan Sweet and Matt Kaiser from Oregon OSHA was thus able to gain statewide audience because the topic included the entire state and our recording of the meeting was available online.
 
What’s on the horizon for you from your Southern Oregon Chapter for the next three months? While it is only available to ASSP members, don’t forget the ASP/CSP study group. This study group is designed for safety professionals preparing to take the ASP/CSP tests but available to any ASSP member. Join us monthly on the third Tuesday evening, 7:00-8:30 pm by virtual web-based meeting. Our next study group will be September 15th.
 
Pay special attention to Jon Sowers’s upcoming presentation on September 1st where he will discuss the 5 principles of Human Performance. This proves to be an interactive adventure into the Human and Organizational Performance principles that are changing the way we talk about safety in the workplace.
 
In October, we are going to host our first ever Safety Committee University which is shaping up to be a great event to provide support for your safety committee members. We are working hard to keep this event free as a special thankyou to the Southern Oregon community for helping make our Occupational Safety and Health Conference a major success over the decades.
 
David Hanson
 
 
Stay safe!

​Everything that happens in your organization, happens because of the systems in place that ultimately determine the outcomes. Successful organizations have more positive outcomes than negative outcomes. Stellar organizations are able to analyze these systems and make changes to get the results they expect. We must always remember that these systems are within our control, either by intention or by default. To be a stellar organization, we must control these systems by intention. To do this, we must first learn all we can about the relationships between these systems.
 
That is the purpose of learning teams. The learning teams approach has been most recently popularized by Todd Conklin, Bob Edwards, and Jim Howe. According to Conklin, Edwards, and Howe, a learning team is a loosely structured group of workers from any level or levels within an organization that has been assembled to learn how a significant event happened. This group adheres to some key principles that ensure team effectiveness:

• The focus is not on finding someone to blame.
• Primarily interested in “how” an event happened. (Not why or who.)
• The primary focus is on what lessons we can learn from the context of the story of the event.

 
Learning teams were originally developed to improve operational learning and make it more effective. There is an important realization that workers have a more complete “contextual understanding” of how work happens in the field. A learning team can harness this understanding to learn more about what is really happening at the task level.
 
We need to try to learn about our systems—failures and successes—before we can make meaningful improvements in our operations. The very things that we do to keep each other safe at work are the very same kinds of things we need to do to be successful in everything we do.
 
I have seen these principles in action. When I was a supervisor, the best solutions we ever found were when we included employees in the information gathering and decision-making process. When frontline employees were part of the decision-making process, they had buy-in and saw the benefit of the solutions we were implementing. As a supervisor, it was so much easier to manage a system that was established with input from all levels of an organization and that considered the experience and viewpoints from frontline employees. Remember, frontline employees are experts on the frontline day-to-day context of how your operation works. The employee that offers a suggestion that is accepted becomes personally motivated to participate in the implementation of that solution.
 
That is the challenge that the learning team principles ask us to confront: Let’s get better, and let’s do it together.
 
David Hanson, CSP