ABOUT HOP
If you've found your way to this site, chances are the terms Human and Organizational Performance, or HOP, or the New View, or Human Performance mean something to you (if not, welcome anyway!)
In short, HOP is an industrial operating philosophy that recognizes safety (and quality) as an emergent property of the larger system. Good performance is not the absence of errors (human error is inevitable), it's the presence of the capacity to fail safely (Conklin).
To embrace this "New View" we need a paradigm shift in thought.
We need to move away from looking for fault in our people, and towards looking for weaknesses in our system; to "become less surprised by error, and more interested in learning" (Edwards).
ABOUT ME
"I couldn't stop doing this if I tried."
I heard about HOP for the first time as a safety professional for a global manufacturing company. It changed my life. HOP gave me the words to explain what I had intuitively believed to be right, but struggled to articulate. After the class I walked up to the presenter and asked him to teach me everything he knew. "I want to do this - whatever this movement is, I want to be part of it."
HOP is a cultural change, a movement that needs to be planned and fostered. Since the first day I heard the concepts, HOP became my passion, and my mission became clear: I want to make this message accessible and valuable for anyone that has a moment to listen. I want to help integrate these concepts in to what we already do in industry. I want to help embed it in leadership messaging, in management systems, and use it to enhance the great initiatives we already have. I want to help work towards the day that HOP is not called HOP, it is just "what we do."
I want to help make HOP our new social norm.
-Andrea Baker
My HOP Journey
I started my Human and Organizational Performance journey while working for one of the largest multinational industrial companies in the world. As an environmental health and safety leader of manufacturing, assembly and distribution facilities, I struggled through the complexity of adopting HOP principles from the ground up. Each location, each leader, each learning team required some knowledge, a lot of patience, clever planning (and sometimes a bit of luck). Getting buy-in around HOP principles was both my greatest challenge and greatest reward.
In 2014, I was named the HOP leader for one of the company sectors and started to tackle how to position HOP as a culture change for the sector, how to give our movement a foothold. I taught HOP Fundamentals and Learning Teams around the US and helped develop and implement strategies to anchor the concepts in existing operating rhythms. I began extrapolating these strategies to a larger scale, and in 2015 I became the HOP Senior Expert for the company's 300+ multi-sector locations in Europe. The idea of teaching cross culturally was initially terrifying, but despite cultural differences, HOP principles resonated everywhere I spoke. This realization furthered my resolution to not only spread the movement, but to help the industrial community develop HOP culture change strategies, to help embed HOP principles into industrial day-to-day activities, to help make HOP the new norm.