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Frontline worker insights come from
'What we say' and 'How we say it'.

Why should we learn from work?
Why should be learn from why work goes well?

Storytelling from frontline workers dealing with risk daily is powerful, because it provides insights, weak signals, and latent conditions that may not be captured through traditional safety observation and reporting methods. Safety science and human performance emphasize why storytelling is critical.

What are Weak Signals?

Weak signals are early indicators of potential failures that often go unnoticed in standard safety processes. They go unnoticed because they are hard to see and get lost in the noise of everyday work. Yet they can be revealed through discussions about everyday work experiences using the 4Ds and 4Ls.

In Safety Science:

James Reason's *Organizational Accidents Revisited* discusses resident pathogens, which are latent organizational failures that can lead to major incidents if not recognized early.
Sidney Dekker’s *Drift into Failure* highlights how gradual adaptations to constraints and pressures lead to normalizing risk over time, making it crucial to hear firsthand stories from frontline workers.
Resilience Engineering by Hollnagel, Woods, and Leveson suggests that organizations must learn from everyday work, not just accidents.

Workers naturally adapt to complex environments, and their stories provide insights into how safety is actively created, rather than just how failures occur. By listening to stories about these conditions, organizations can uncover systemic inefficiencies, hidden frustrations, and risks that can harm workers physically (acture harm), harm to health (chronic harm) and psychological harm (mental harm),

Think of storytelling using the 4Ds and the 4Ls akin to a Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein. Schien emphasizes that leaders must ask rather than tell, fostering an open environment where workers feel safe sharing their insights. When organizations listen to workers’ stories, they validate frontline experiences, reduce blame, and promote a learning culture.

By shifting your focus from compliance to understanding real work as it happens, you can capture weak signals, uncover hidden risk conditions, and take proactive action to learn and improve where it matters most.

Worker designed story capture and self guided workgroup facilitation.

The 4Ds for Work Insights and Weak Signals

The 4D’s is the frontline team’s view of weak signals by using a “thinking frame” to capture their narrative of everyday work from:

1) Situations, tasks or processes that don’t make sense to the team member “Dumb”

2) Unusual or difficult tasks and processes for the team member “Difficult”

3) Changing or changed situations, tasks, and activities “Different”

4) Risky tasks, processes, situations, or hazards “Dangerous”

The 4Ls for Learning From Routine Work

Routine Work Soak Time is a reflective practice for frontline teams to look back over a period to make the variability visible to them, understand the weak signals that are present to reflect and learn from. Using the 4Ls framework of:

1) "Liked" What do you like, enjoy and are proud of?

2) "Lack" Use the 4Ds to listen to the frustrations, challenges, demands, inefficiencies and surprises in work.

3) "Long" What would make work better?

4) "Learn" What have we learnt, What can we share?

Live dashboards providing better insights of everyday work.

Strengthening the signals

We provide a system with highly customisable dashboards that can be configured to match the organization’s requirements and learning needs. The dashboards can be configured to stakeholder groups to provide specific data views. We can even provide additional dashboards for specific insights.

Context Metrics

The dashboards provide two types of metrics.

Information Metrics

A metric that doesn’t lead to an action but helps provide context of frontline team engagement and participation activities.

Actionable Metrics

A metric that can be used to aid in the decision making process to engage stakeholders in a learning team and help provide the learning team with context.

Workgroup and Enterprise AI Pattern and Trend Recognition

Advanced Weak Signal Analytics For the Curious Mind In An Easy To Use Method

The Agents goal is to help identify systemic constraints, hidden risks, and emerging patterns from worker stories. The Agent can support you to:

Make sense of extracted key trends from worker stories.
Identifying systemic weaknesses, analyze patterns in decision-making, including how workers, supervisors, and management influence safety and efficiency.
Detect bottlenecks in information flow and areas where feedback loops may be broken.
Identify workforce and process challenges.
Highlight emerging trends & learning opportunities and suggest where learning teams could explore recurring system problems and identify improvements already made and gaps that still exist.
Highlight opportunities for process standardization or reducing inefficiencies.
Psychosocial Risk Evaluation based on workplace stressors, emotional and cognitive load on workers, potential harassment, bullying, or toxic culture and language used in stories to flag hidden mental health risks.

What the Agent won't do:

❌ Recommend specific safety actions but suggest areas of curiosity for learning teams.

❌ Assign blame—only system-level insights matter.

❌ Share personal details from stories—privacy is protected.

Learning happens across Workers, Workgroups and the Organization.

Organizational Learning

Making sense of “Weak Signals” by seeing patterns/clusters of worker stories and sentiment reflecting resilience capacity with Informational and Actionable Metrics.

Worker/Workgroup Learning

Workers gain and build on Critical Thinking and Reflection Skills by shifting their view of the system from evaluation and assessment to Critical Appraisal.