Failure in The Workplace
This seminar is for any team wanting to be initiated and discuss how we can identify failure in our workplace. The seminar is also meant for non-practitioners in investigation organizations that want to learn and discuss the complexities of uncovering and communicating failure.
All participants will receive a copy of the Whodunit book elaborating on the seminar content.
Failure, Deception, and The Truth
We all fail, several times each day, at home and at work. We all deceive whether we know it or not. Most often, our errors and our deception are without consequence, benign. However, what if we fail in a work environment, when we are part of a team on a major project or in an industrial environment? Individual and team failure can then have major consequences.
Governments and industry conduct post-mortems, inquiries or investigate failure to ensure we do not repeat the same errors, learn to improve productivity, or prevent disasters. Writing the story of failure is a significant undertaking, a similar process as writing any major report, akin to even writing a memorandum to Cabinet (MC) where we are faced with tackling a problem and determining a way forward.
Both a report and an MC are the result of inquisitive minds putting together a well-diagnosed problem with findings or a path forward. Both products can be developed using investigative work. The result is a truth, one that the signing authority believes to be genuine. Yet, there may be other truths.
This one-day seminar will take you into a journey of failure in the workplace. You will learn that writing a report is building a truth, a truth that may be considered deceiving, a report that is always read by a partly skeptical audience. You will learn to understand how failure happens and how your report may be perceived. You will also learn about the challenges of communicating your findings in a polarized environment.
How the seminar is taught:
The seminar is designed around a series of 15 short modules (average of 30 minutes each) where Marc-André Poisson provides some basic theories and then leads a discussion with participants.
Topics covered:
- Failure modes (slips, lapses, mistakes, and poorly adapted plans)
- Human performance, not always up to par
- Socially induced errors and telling the failure story
- The team: a live and cultural moving target
- Understanding failure through a gynocentric and traditional knowledge lens
- From theory to practise – reasoning and developing a schematic of failure
- Developing knowledge, finding out the “truth”
- Do we define reality or accumulate knowledge?
- Writing the most productive story
- From the What to the Why – the emotional purpose behind the story
- Avoiding and communicating the truth
- Lying and deceiving, a normal human trait
- The not-so-gullible audience, the motivated audience
- Who do we trust?
- Communicating knowledge to a skeptical and biased audience