A prominent US senator is asking the National Security Agency to provide guidance to the general public on best practices for using virtual private networks to secure their communications from spying by foreign adversaries.
VPNs funnel all of a user’s Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server. The design provides strong assurances that no one between the user and the server can read the encrypted contents. VPNs also allow users to hide their IP addresses from the destination servers they communicate with. While US agencies have previously recommended use of VPNs, none have given recommendations on which ones provide adequate protection.
There are a host of limitations that can undo many of the protections users may think their VPN provides them. For instance, the encrypted tunnel often terminates once a single server decrypts the traffic and sends it on to its final destination. That means the decrypted traffic or the sending and destination IP addresses may be available for snooping by rogue employees or attackers who hack the server. VPNs also don’t encrypt certain types of metadata, such as time stamps, allowing nation-states to build profiles that can be useful in intelligence gathering.
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I’m by no means a serial corporate dinner attendee, but I do feel I’ve sat through my fair share of after-dinner leadership talks. The speakers are usually held up as shining examples of courage, resilience and leadership under pressure. Their stories have a reliable shape, generally including a man, a mountain and some frostbitten fingers – the typical hero’s journey. They run longer than scheduled. As my colleague put it the morning after one particularly arduous tale, by the end of the evening we felt we’d been up and down the mountain with him.
I don’t want to be too dismissive, because the power of storytelling is huge. Hearing stories of extreme peril offers an inspiring reminder that people can act well under extraordinary pressure and that teams can hold together when everything is falling apart. Stories like these, told well, are worth hearing. The problem is that these stories tend to gloss over the most helpful parts for anyone trying to build a team that will actually perform in a crisis. The mountain story always focuses on the leader’s heroism at the moment of peak drama, but the evidence about what makes a difference for teams in crisis points somewhere else entirely.
Mary J. Waller and Seth A. Kaplan’s Crisis-Ready Teams draws on ten studies, nine of which compare high and low performing teams under crisis conditions. What emerges from that body of research cuts against the mountain-summit view of crisis leadership: performance under pressure is shaped less by what happens at the peak than by what happens before it.
For teams that work together already, the patterns of behaviour that will matter in a crisis are built – or not – in ordinary working conditions. Whatever interaction patterns they settle into will be the ones they fall back on when things get hard; they are unlikely to change once pressure mounts.
In contrast, in ‘swift-starting teams’ – groups brought together specifically to manage a crisis such as an accident response team – there are no established patterns to fall back on. These teams are usually composed of experts; highly trained people who may not know one another already, but must immediately “engage in the immediate interdependent performance of complex tasks.” What distinguishes the high performing from the low performing swift-starting teams turns out to be remarkably similar – it’s still about what happens first, but in this case that means how deliberately and effectively they set the tone for working well together in the very short opening phase of their teaming.
You can see this in a simulation study into medical teams that only met for a short period before a patient arrived for resuscitation. The teams with more balanced communication during that initial window went on to engage in higher levels of implicit coordination – the kind of fluid, almost wordless teamwork that looks, from the outside, like a well-oiled machine. However, teams where the lead physician dominated that early forming time by monologuing at their new teammates performed less well. A parallel finding in flight crew research found that greater reciprocity and stability in pre-flight conversations predicted higher performance in the air. The teams who hadn’t been able to have open and reciprocal communication from the start struggled to perform in their respective crisis contexts.
But what does ‘balanced’ communication mean? There is nuance here, and balance does not mean enforced equal airtime, where everyone must contribute the same number of words or talk for the exact same amount of time before the meeting can end. But it is about giving everyone a chance to speak and making sure everyone’s voice is heard. Connected to this, ‘reciprocity’, another early indicator of later performance, is about responsiveness – a pattern of exchange in which information offered is acknowledged and built on by other team members, rather than landing in silence or being cut across.
So establishing from the start how the team will work together matters. What we want to hear is a balance of voices with no single voice dominating, and people listening and responding to each other.
Research into multidisciplinary crisis management teams found that they naturally move through three recognisable stages when they come together:
Interestingly, high performing teams appeared slower at getting going, tending to spend longer in both structuring and information sharing phases. This, it turns out, is especially important when we bring together individuals from diverse professional backgrounds; they might individually come to quite different conclusions about similar information, so we actually need those interpretations to be spoken and shared so that other team members can “compare the voiced interpretations with their own understanding and, if needed, correct or add to this interpretation.” The outcome is a better overall understanding of the situation than any single team member could have reached by themselves.
Lower performing teams moved far quicker to decision making, but with little shared understanding to build on, their decision making was laboured and often inconclusive, a kind of meandering indecision. Because they’d never fully established how to best work together, they struggled to make good decisions as the situation unfolded.
A helpful way of thinking about it is that crisis-ready teams carry multiple shared mental models, including one that they’ve constructed together about how to best work together. They understand that a crisis is not a single moment requiring one quick response, but a sequence of phases, where their understanding of the situation and therefore the ‘best next thing’ to do will keep changing. There is no space in this picture for a competing-for-the-right-answer dynamic, where team members vie for power, and there’s also no room for the unilateral hero, who pushes forward with a solution without discussing it with or listening to the rest of the team.
So the research is clear that adaptability is essential, and crisis-ready teams need to do far more than simply execute a plan. This requires an ability to let go of existing work structures and move into active, collective sensemaking – to co-construct a shared understanding of what is actually happening, rather than what was anticipated.
The pull in the opposite direction is threat-rigidity: the tendency, under pressure, to fall back on established patterns even when those patterns no longer fit. As Staw, Sandelands and Dutton (1981) found, under threat a team restricts the information it takes in, narrowing its attention to a few dominant cues, and it also constricts control, so that power and decision-making concentrate upwards to whoever sits highest in the hierarchy. This is unsurprisingly corrosive for psychological safety and can tip a team into solution fixation: it locks onto an early answer, and few voices are able to challenge it. Yet crisis situations keep moving, so a fixed answer defended by a single voice is unlikely to remain the best answer. The reflex to shift authority upwards and narrow who gets heard strikes just at the point that teams need to be able to gather wide input and have many eyes, minds and voices working together to come up with solutions.
Adapting well starts with going out to meet the changing situation. In Waller’s (1999) aviation study, the difference that stood out during the crisis itself was that the high performing crews collected and moved information between each other earlier: they built a picture of the situation as it unfolded, passed it quickly to the people who needed it, and were faster to sort what mattered from what did not.
And this prioritisation of the information in the room is also key. In their own research, described in the book, Waller and Kaplan and their colleagues studied mine rescue teams and found that the faster-acting teams did two things more than the slower ones. They used more closed-loop communication, in which the sender speaks their message, the receiver reads it back and the sender confirms that they have it correct. While it might seem slow, this makes it clear to all what has been heard, not just what has been said.
Related to this, the faster teams also used more explicit coordination, spelling guidance out in detail rather than leaving it to be inferred. This looks like it should contradict the earlier point about implicit coordination being the marker of a well-functioning team, but as Waller and Kaplan argue, implicit coordination only works when the whole team already shares the same picture. In a novel crisis situation, you cannot count on that, so the faster teams say the thing rather than assume it goes without saying and have to repair the misunderstanding later. This is low-context communication under pressure, the explicit, spelled-out kind I’ve written about before. The kind of explicit communication that already earns its place in ordinary work, for reasons of clarity, inclusion and psychological safety, matters even more in a crisis.
The after-dinner speaker is not wrong that crisis performance is visible in the moment, whether that’s up the mountain, in surgery or managing a critical incident. But we miss the most important part if we don’t pay more attention to what gets built before that. The team that moves fluidly through a crisis shares information, speaks up, listens, builds on each other’s ideas and adapts without freezing – and that team has been working on this since they first started working together. The mountain story locates the heroism in the ascent. Waller and Kaplan locate it in the preparation, the patterns, the reciprocity, the quality of the communication and the willingness to structure before acting. It’s less dramatic, perhaps, and not such a compelling story. But it is far more effective.
Further Reading
Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams
Crisis-Ready Teams by Mary J. Waller and Seth A. Kaplan
Zijlstra, F. R. H., Waller, M., & Phillips, S. (2012). Setting the tone: early interaction patterns in swift starting teams as a predictor of effectiveness. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 21(5), 749-777. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2012.690399
Uitdewilligen S, Waller MJ. Information sharing and decision-making in multidisciplinary crisis management teams. J Organ Behav. 2018; 39: 731–748. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2301
Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501–524. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392337
Waller, M. J. (1999). The timing of adaptive group responses to nonroutine events. Academy of Management Journal, 42(2), 127–137. https://doi.org/10.2307/257088
Su, L., Kaplan, S., Burd, R., Winslow, C., Hargrove, A., & Waller, M. (2017). Trauma resuscitation: can team behaviours in the prearrival period predict resuscitation performance?. BMJ simulation & technology enhanced learning, 3(3), 106–110. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjstel-2016-000143
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Today is our hand over day, as my brother, Geoff, and his family are coming to borrow the boat for a week. Obi had his normal poo walk and then I cooked some breakfast, using up a pack of sausage and some mushrooms with some bread, with some fresh coffee. Then we started cleaning, and packing our clothes ready for the swap, at about this time lucky we found our toilet tank was full.
This morning the Girls and Sonia took Obi for his poo walk and counted 30 boats moored up ahead of us. While they were out I had a luke warm shower and when they returned I baked some part-baked rolls and fried some bacon for some excellent bacon rolls. Then I prepared the boat for our next chug, not sure where we will get to today, but we wanted to stop at Great Hayward to visit the…
The girls took Obi for this poo walk, while I got the boat ready, when they returned the Grandchildren had breakfast, Sonia and I had coffee, then we set off. Today we planned to get to Penkridge and stay for a couple of days. Not long after setting off we see a strange sign (This is the one at the other side of the area as I was too slow with the camera). I was wondering what I would do…
Dive into the nostalgic world of vintage and retro styling with this collection of Photoshop actions. Whether you’re a photographer, designer, or digital artist, these actions will help give your photos and graphics that vintage aesthetic we all love.
Our collection offers a range of filters to give your photos soft palettes, gentle fades, and other quaint effects. From landscapes to portraits, you can create an authentic vintage aesthetic with just a few clicks.
These actions can help recreate the look of a vintage postcard or an old family album or bring the style of a bygone era to your modern images.
This collection has the best Photoshop actions and presets to streamline your workflow and help you achieve the vintage look you want. Find the perfect action for your next project below!
If you’re looking for more vintage or retro resources, you might like our free collections of Photoshop brushes, vector templates, or fonts.
These vintage cinematic Photoshop actions and Lightroom presets will give your photos an authentic, nostalgic look. This bundle has 50 actions, including vintage film colors, dark filters for night photos, vibrant effects, and more. You’ll also get vintage LUTs for video editing.
Light leaks, date stamps, and more! This retro Photoshop action collection has everything you need for nostalgic photographs. You’ll get 15 retro film Photoshop actions inspired by vintage camera styles, ten light leak overlays, and more. If you love retro, add this pack to your kit!
Capture stunning shots and add indie charm to them with these Photoshop actions. This collection includes 17 actions, over 110 gradient maps, and 21 PNG light leak effects. Perfect for creating a nostalgic atmosphere for your portfolios, magazines, and social media images.
With these Photoshop actions, you can transform your photos into watercolor art or give them a vintage atmosphere. This set includes Photoshop brushes, patterns, 20 actions, and everything you need to create vintage. With one click, you’re ready to go!
With these Photoshop actions, you will get authentic retro contrasts and vignetting. This set includes ten actions to create an analog film atmosphere in your images, perfect for portfolios, magazines, and social media. You’ll love the subtle retro tones.
All you need to travel back in time is Photoshop and these vintage actions. This collection helps you transform your standard photos into vintage works of art. You can fine-tune the actions’ details to get old camera effects or create a full-on masterpiece.
From the faded ’60s to the vibrant ’70s, this set of retro Photoshop actions has every old-school aesthetic you’d ever want! It includes seven editable Photoshop actions, textures, and light leak overlays. Easily create a beautiful lookbook, image, or poster!
Elegant and authentic, these retro text effects for Photoshop are perfect for your next project. Drawing inspiration from the 50s and 60s aesthetics, in this pack, you’ll get ten unique 3D styles, and they’re 100% editable.
Create Polaroid photos without a Polaroid camera! This Photoshop generator will give you a vibrant Lomography effect that replicates the original styling of Polaroid photos. You can also choose a colorful frame and add special effects like fisheye.
Transform your photo into a work of art with this vintage art Photoshop action set. The action pack also includes brushes, splashes, and color grading, so you can easily give your modern photos a vintage look.
Perfect for wedding photographers, these vintage Photoshop actions will give your clients an unforgettable wedding album. They will give your original shots a soft and gentle look and feel.
Give your photos a retro touch with these light leak Photoshop presets. They’re ideal for retro-themed photos and add vintage charm to adventure shots. You’ll get 25 light leak effects to work with.
You don’t need to travel back in time with your camera to create stunning retro videos. Use these animated retro vintage film Photoshop actions. You’ll get 24 color options with animated light leaks, camera shakes, and other effects.
These stunning photo effect actions allow you to create vintage photos and graphics quickly. Download them to add vintage charm with just a few clicks. They’re perfect for stylish fashion editorials and engaging social media posts.
Stylish and authentic, these retro and vintage text Photoshop actions are perfect for old-school typography. You’ll get 18 high-quality Photoshop actions that offer creative text effects for a variety of projects, from flyers and posters to cinematic titles and covers. You can easily use them via smart objects.
Create gorgeous graphics with these vintage text effects. Nine styles are included, from old-school cafe signs to funky 3D text effects. The smart objects system in Photoshop allows you to easily add your own content with just a few clicks.
Get perfect toning with these vintage and retro color effects for Photoshop! This pack includes 21 effects, as well as creative effects like vignettes, noise effects, and more.
Turn your original photos into vintage art with this retro Photoshop action. In just a few clicks, you can transform your images into masterpieces with vintage splashes, typography, effects, and colors.
These vintage film Photoshop actions are perfect for professional photoshoots. You’ll get ten actions to create a vintage atmosphere while retaining the beauty of your original shots. They have been inspired by analog films such as Agfa, Fujifilm, and Kodak.
Create retro prints with these Photoshop actions. Inspired by retro art, this collection includes brushes and patterns to create unique effects. All you have to do is brush over the parts of the image you want to transform and play the action.
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Actions panel. You can usually find it by going to the Window menu and selecting Actions.Actions panel. Click on the little menu icon (usually represented by three horizontal lines or dots) at the top-right corner of the panel. From the dropdown menu, select Load Actions. A file dialog box will appear. Navigate to the location where the .atn file is saved, select it, and click Load.Actions panel as a new set. The set will have a folder icon and the name of the action set.Actions panel.Actions panel. Click this button, and Photoshop will automatically apply the selected action to your image.File menu in Photoshop.This collection of Photoshop actions has everything you need to give your photos and graphics a retro or vintage touch.
Versatile and user-friendly, these actions will streamline your workflow and help simplify the editing process. With just a couple of clicks, you can transform your work into beautiful, timeless art.
The post 20+ Best Photoshop Actions for Retro & Vintage Photo Effects appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
Yesterday we managed just one of the Audlem flight before we moored and walked uptown the excellent Shroppie Fly canal side pub, today we are going to finish the last 14 locks of the Audlem flight. Obi has a quick poo walk today as he will walk the Audlem flight, today’s breakfast was an over stuffed bacon roll as we had some bacon that needed eating. but by the time it was cooked and…
An early start for Sonia this morning as she left the boat at 6:30am to catch a train to Birmingham International Station to visit the NEC and the Festival of Quilts. Obi and I walked up to the Nantwich Aquaduct for his poo walk, lots of dog and there carers walking along the towpath this morning, with most of the visitor mooring taken. For me having not fixed the power problems…
Canal Maps has just landed on the Google Play Store, joining the iPhone app that’s been out for a few months. Same offline maps of the UK’s canal network, now on Android too: 150+ canals, rivers and rings, thousands of points of interest (moorings, pubs, water points, sanitary stations, boatyards, locks and more), all bundled in the app so you can use it with no signal.
Canonical has released Workshop, a new open-source tool to create reproducible development environments with a single command. Using YAML files, the same development setup can be reproduced across different hardware and devices, reducing dependency headaches and configuration drift. Environments in Workshop are built from SDKs (packages that install languages, frameworks and tools). Most of these come from the SDK Store, which supports versioned channels similar to the Snap Store so that projects can define specific SDK versions to use. Canonical offers SDKs for Ollama, OpenCode, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm at launch, but users can create and define project-specific SDKs […]
You're reading Canonical’s Workshop: sandboxed, reproducible dev environments, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Canonical has released Workshop, a new open-source tool to create reproducible development environments with a single command. Using YAML files, the same development setup can be reproduced across different hardware and devices, reducing dependency headaches and configuration drift. Environments in Workshop are built from SDKs (packages that install languages, frameworks and tools). Most of these come from the SDK Store, which supports versioned channels similar to the Snap Store so that projects can define specific SDK versions to use. Canonical offers SDKs for Ollama, OpenCode, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm at launch, but users can create and define project-specific SDKs […]
You're reading Canonical’s Workshop: sandboxed, reproducible dev environments, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Weddings are joyous occasions that create fond memories. It’s one reason why we love to hang on to keepsakes from the day. Each memento is a reminder of good times.
Perhaps there’s no better keepsake than wedding stationery. The feel of the paper, the elegant fonts, and the carefully selected color scheme tell a story. It’s no wonder we put so much effort into making them perfect.
These projects can be time-consuming for graphic designers. But don’t worry – we can help you get off to a fast start.
Below is a curated collection of wedding stationery templates for Adobe Photoshop. They cover a variety of styles – you’re sure to find one that matches your needs. Plus, they’re easy to edit and customize to your heart’s content.
Find your favorite template, and you’ll have everything you need to create a precious keepsake in no time!
You might also like our collection of wedding templates for InDesign.
Are you looking for a perfectly coordinated set of wedding stationery templates? The following collections have you covered with templates for save-the-date cards, invitations, RSVPs, menus, thank-you notes, and more. These professionally-designed templates will help you every step of the way.
Invite friends and family in style with these beautiful wedding invitation templates. You’ll find everything from classic to modern looks here. Some packages come with extras, such as alternate styles and additional types of stationery.
These save-the-date card templates are the perfect way to share happy news! Included are ready-to-mail postcards and standalone options. You’ll even find templates that use custom shapes. There’s something for every taste. Use your favorite to build anticipation for the big day.
Dress up your RSVP cards with these stunning templates. There are great options whether you prefer to send a postcard or a traditional card in an envelope. Customize them to the happy couple’s specifications and start creating memories.
These templates provide an elegant way to say “thanks” to guests. Type a message or, even better, handwrite something personal. It’s something loved ones will cherish for years to come. And it’s another way to mark a special event.
A photo album is the perfect way to look back in time. Each of these Photoshop templates can be customized with your photography and text. Have an album professionally printed, and it can be passed on to each generation.
Establishing the perfect look for your wedding stationery project can be a challenge. There are so many types of documents and endless possibilities. Luckily, the Photoshop templates in this collection make your job much easier.
Find the options that interest you and start experimenting. Here’s hoping you create something that captures the magic of the day!
The post 30+ Best Wedding Stationery Templates for Photoshop appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.
Often, when we’re trying to improve how work gets done, we start with principles. We agree what we believe in, or are working towards, at a high level, and then figure out how those ideas translate into day-to-day practice. This piece takes a different route.
Instead of beginning with abstract principles, I want to start with a concrete practice: Learning Teams, from the world of HOP (Human and Organisational Performance). Through the excellent work of Sam Goodman and others, Learning Teams have evolved into a reasonably well-defined way of bringing people together to learn from everyday work.
By looking closely at how Learning Teams are designed and facilitated, we can surface the deeper principles they rest on – principles that reach far beyond pure safety contexts, and have important things to say about learning, power and psychological safety at work.
Let’s dive in…
Learning Teams are a way of creating space to learn from events at work, from work as it is done, not work as imagined or prescribed in tidy process maps or policies. They focus on real work – the complex, sometimes messy and often adaptive way that real work gets done, shaped as it is by context, constraints and trade-offs.
The purpose of a Learning Team is to bring together the people who are closest to the work, those at the sharp end, to share their knowledge of how the work really happens, so that the organisation can learn.
Learning Teams can lead to many different outcomes, but there is only one true requirement: that we learn more about “normal work.” If a Learning Team helps an organisation better understand how work is actually done, then it has been a success.
When we get stuck into the world of organisational learning, it quickly becomes clear that, in theory, we could learn from absolutely everything that happens at work – the good, the bad and the truly horrific.
In practice though, running a Learning Team requires an investment of time, so it simply wouldn’t be possible to do one for everything that happens at work. So the question becomes, which events are most worth learning from?
Rather than automatically choosing the things that went most wrong or had the most severe impact, Learning Teams invites us to consider which events have the most learning potential (as does PSIRF). This might be a failure or breakdown, but it might also be something that went unexpectedly well, or a situation that could have gone wrong but didn’t, perhaps a “good catch”.
We’re often looking for “goldilocks” events that sit in the middle ground. Not so rare that they tell us very little about everyday work (a meteorite strike), but not so common that we’re already well aware of what’s happening. Not so severe that they automatically trigger a formal investigation, with all the emotional, regulatory or legal burden that can bring, but not so trivial that there’s nothing very interesting to explore.
This isn’t a precise science. We can never know in advance exactly what learning a conversation will surface. But when deciding whether an event is a good candidate for a Learning Team, it can be helpful to weigh up factors such as:
When we explore Learning Teams in our HOP workshops, this is often the point where people start to see themselves in it. The examples of what might trigger a Learning Team vary wildly, depending on the kind of work people do.
For some, it’s a spike in complaints after a shiny new IT system goes live. For others, it’s a team restructure that didn’t quite go as planned. And sometimes it’s something more positive – like a particular store or location suddenly outperforming the rest, leaving everyone asking, what on earth are they doing differently?
It doesn’t really matter whether these are successes or failures, as long as they spark some organisational curiosity. We can see all of these as opportunities to ask better questions about how work is really getting done, and what people are adapting to in order to make things work.
Once we’ve chosen an event with learning potential, the next question is to decide who to include in the Learning Team.
There are a small number of distinct roles, each with a specific purpose:
Owner: The Owner is someone with enough organisational authority to get the Learning Team off the ground. They ensure the right people are invited, and they commit to championing any organisational actions that emerge afterwards. Crucially, the Owner opens the session, welcoming people and setting the intent, and then leaves. (We’ll explore why this matters shortly.)
Facilitator: Sometimes referred to as the Coach, they are there to facilitate the learning, not to be the technical expert. They don’t have detailed knowledge of the event being discussed, but they are skilled in holding the process. They set expectations, often through a social contract, keep the conversation on track, and help the group stay focused on learning.
Scribe: The Scribe plays another essential, but often underestimated, role. Like the Facilitator, they are not someone with direct knowledge of the work being discussed. Their focus is on capturing the qualitative richness of the conversation as it unfolds. They manage the “wall of discovery”, where insights and learning are made visible to the group.
Team members: There may be two, three, or more team members in the Learning Team. These are the people closest to the work, who hold first-hand knowledge of how work is actually done at the sharp end and ideally, they were present during the event being discussed. Their primary role is to share that knowledge. They may identify improvements along the way, but that is not their main aim.
Learning Teams may also include people who weren’t directly involved in the specific event, but who do similar work or interact with the same system. This broadens any learning beyond a single episode and helps surface patterns in normal work that might otherwise remain invisible.
One of my favourite things about Learning Teams is their intentional structure. They are deliberately designed in two distinct parts, with a pause in the middle.
Before the Learning Team itself, there is some preparation required: being clear about the focus of the learning, identifying who needs to be involved, and making the practical arrangements to bring people together. Then we have the meetings:
Meeting 1: Learning from the work
The first meeting typically lasts around 60–90 minutes – long enough to allow for depth, but not so long that we lose focus. If it feels like we need more time than this, it’s often a signal that the event we’ve chosen is too broad and needs narrowing.
The sole purpose of this meeting is to understand what happened, or what happens, in the flow of real work. This is not a space for jumping to solutions or improvements, however tempting that might be. The Facilitator’s role here is to protect that intent, and they may need to be quite firm about it! This is in deliberate contrast with many “traditional” investigations, which tend to focus on a single incident and work backwards to identify where things failed. Learning Teams spend proportionally more time understanding how work usually succeeds, what people were adapting to, and why actions made sense in their context at the time.
“Soak time”
Between the two meetings, it’s helpful to allow some “soak time” – often around a day. This pause gives people space to process and reflect on what emerged, and sometimes realise what was missing or left unsaid in the first conversation.
Meeting 2: Making sense and improvements
The second meeting brings the group back together. The Facilitator supports the group to recap what was learned in Meeting 1, invites them to add any new reflections, and only then opens up the conversation about possible improvements or changes. This meeting is usually a similar length to the first.
As already touched on, the only essential outcome of a learning team is an improved understanding of normal work.
Sometimes, depending on the event, this learning will naturally surface areas where things can be improved, and maybe even some ideas for improvement. But improvements are a possible by-product of Learning Teams, not their primary purpose.
A Learning Team that ends with richer insight, a more nuanced understanding of work, and perhaps the ability to ask better questions about how work happens, has still been successful – even if it doesn’t produce a tidy list of actions.
Evidence supports this shift in emphasis. Interestingly, a comparative study in a large NHS hospital found that Learning Teams generated more actions overall, and a substantially higher proportion of system-focused improvements, than conventional root cause analyses, possibly because they explore work across multiple contexts rather than compressing learning into a small number of technical or individual “root causes”.
The success of a Learning Team hinges on psychological safety. Do the people in the team feel safe to be honest about what happened? If not, we’re unlikely to learn very much.
This sits at the heart of why the Owner of a Learning Team will usually step out after the introductions. The Owner is, by definition, someone with greater organisational authority – they have the clout to convene the Learning Team and the responsibility to act on what emerges afterwards. But their presence in the discussion itself can unintentionally introduce a power gradient that makes candour harder.
This isn’t because of bad intention, or a failure on their part to reduce the power gradient. It’s a very pragmatic recognition that hierarchy shapes behaviour. When someone with formal authority is in the room, people are more likely to soften their accounts, or steer away from what feels risky to say.
There’s also a more practical reason for the Owner leaving. The Owner typically doesn’t hold first-hand knowledge of the work at the sharp end; their role in the Learning Team is to enable learning and respond to it, not to be the source of it. By stepping out, the Owner helps create the conditions for more open, real conversations, where the people closest to the work can speak with fewer filters.
In many organisations, when something happens that we want to learn from, we default to an investigation. A group is brought together, often with more senior people in the room, and the focus quickly turns to understanding what went wrong, often who did wrong, and what needs to change.
Learning Teams take a different approach.
Rather than being judged from on high, the people who do the work are treated as the ones who know most about it. Time is spent first on understanding what work looks like in practice, before determining whether anything needs to be fixed. We put a bit of space between learning and decision making.
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
― Richard P. Feynman
This doesn’t mean Learning Teams replace formal investigations altogether. Some events will always need a formal response. But if we’re serious about learning from everyday work, not just from catastrophic failures, then we need approaches that make it easier for people to speak honestly about how work actually gets done.
That, for me, is what Learning Teams really offer. They invite us to take a better stance, one that starts with curiosity, treats people at the sharp end as experts in the work, and accepts that understanding has to come before improvement.
Taking it further
Interested to learn more? Join our next HOP Fundamentals workshop, where we explore Learning Teams and much, much more.
Further Reading
Work as Imagined vs Work as Done
The Sharp End and Blunt End of Education
Robbins, T., Tipper, S., King, J., Ramachandran, S.K., Pandit, J.J. and Pandit, M., 2021. Evaluation of learning teams versus root cause analysis for incident investigation in a large United Kingdom National Health Service Hospital. Journal of Patient Safety, 17(8), pp.e1800-e1805.
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I got pretty sick this week. I was wiped out with a nasty bout of tonsillitis – high temperature, exhausted and felt awful. The doctor put me on strong antibiotics, painkillers, and told me, in no uncertain terms, to rest up and take it easy.
What felt even worse than the illness was having to cancel a client workshop. As far as I can remember, we haven’t cancelled one in about four years. We usually manage to build in enough redundancy for someone else to deliver it, but this time, for various logistical reasons, it just wasn’t possible.
And we really wrestled with it. We spent far too long trying to find a way to make it work. Maybe I could load up on painkillers and caffeine. Maybe the 3 hour drive there, delivering the workshop, driving back and then collapsing wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe I could just power through on adrenaline.
Looking back, I can see all the forces pulling us toward keeping the plan on track: a worry about disappointing the client; all the preparation, travel planning and childcare we’d already arranged; and, if I’m honest, the deeply normalised idea that “pushing through” is the right thing to do. All of that created a powerful feeling that we should still try to deliver.
In reality it would have been a very bad idea for me, for the client, and for other road users! Eventually, we contacted the client, postponed the session… and they were perfectly fine about rescheduling.
This fierce desire to continue with the plan, even though it no longer makes any sense, or is actually unsafe to do so, is a great example of plan continuation bias.
Plan continuation bias (also known as get-there-itis in aviation, course correction bias, or “summit fever” in mountaineering) is the cognitive tendency to stick with an existing plan even when the conditions have changed and the plan no longer makes sense or isn’t safe to continue.
It’s best known in aviation, where get-there-itis means that pilots may press on with planned courses in bad weather, continue flights with marginal fuel, or persist with unstable approaches that should really demand a go-around. The same pattern is common in mountaineering, and I’ve got many experiences of this myself – I can particularly remember one occasion on Crib Goch where we reluctantly turned around after bad weather set in, but the decision itself was really hard, almost emotionally painful, because we were already well up onto the ridge.
It happens in healthcare too, where teams continue to attempt procedures when it’s time to stop or change (as in the tragic case of Elaine Bromiley), and we also see it in product or project teams, where people press on towards the original brief even though the context around them has completely changed.
It’s worth noting that plan continuation bias isn’t plain old stubbornness – it’s about how we humans make sense of the world, particularly when we’re under pressure, operating in uncertainty, and subject to social risk.
“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”
— Kenny Rogers
When we’re under high workload and time pressure, our attention naturally narrows on the task – the goal we’re trying to achieve. We may simply not have the bandwidth to process everything, and our confirmation bias means that we pay more attention to information that appears to support the plan, and discount, or don’t even see, information that suggests we should change course. So even when most of the signs point towards “turn back”, we cling to the scraps of evidence that say “it’ll be fine, keep going”.
This is one reason why we can often spot plan continuation in hindsight, and it can become something of a counterfactual, as “obviously wrong” after it’s already happened. Although to an outside observer afterwards, it seems obvious that we should have changed course, this may have been cognitively invisible to the person in the moment.
There’s a strong sunk cost element to plan continuation – when we’ve already invested time, money, effort, and reputation something, it means that stopping or changing direction feels like a failure: “We’ve put so much into this, we can’t stop now.”
But of course, that’s a fallacy, even though it feels right and noble to continue. It doesn’t make sense to keep pouring resources into something that’s no longer going to deliver value, or is actively unsafe to ourselves or others. Yet the more we have invested, and the closer we are to our goal, the more we tend to rationalise continuing.
Plan continuation bias is compounded when the plan was defined by someone in power – a CEO, senior leader, major client, or powerful stakeholder. In these cases, we may well predict that challenging that goal is likely to incur interpersonal or career risk. None of us want to disappoint our boss, and challenging decisions that were made by someone with power over our employment status or career success is rarely easy. And of course, there are other risks too. We might worry that in raising concerns about the plan, we’ll be seen as a poor team player, as not being “committed enough”, or as the negative one in the group.
We humans tend to have a deep need for harmony and belonging, so continuing with the plan often feels more coherent, comfortable and socially safe than being the dissident who says, “We should stop.”
Some goals become symbolic of what overall “success” means – in mountaineering, it’s the summit, but in organisations, it might be a launch date, a target, or an OKR. This is especially true if that goal has been made public, or committed to with large posters and announcements. Sometimes organisations even use mountaineering metaphors to describe these lofty and ambitious goals. All this can mean that we drift into an all-or-nothing mindset where summit = success, and turning back = failure.
If you’ve read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air about the Everest disaster in the ’90s (Everest is the colonial name for the mountain known locally as Sagarmāthā in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet), you’ll be familiar with this story: along with other errors and misjudgements, some climbers pushed for the summit even after bad weather set in and the safe window had closed. Summit fever, along with a great deal of sunk cost (it’s expensive to climb Everest, and climbers spend months preparing) meant that climbers became fixated on this singular goal of summiting Everest at any cost. For many of them, that cost was their lives.
But as one of my climbing instructors used to say “Getting up is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” (I don’t think he was the first to say this!)
The same goes for organisations delivering projects and products: the real failure isn’t “we didn’t ship,” but shipping something that no longer makes sense and delivers no real value. It’s much wiser to be here the following day to try something new, than to risk the business, or our lives, on a potentially already failed project.
CRM (Crew Resource Management) in aviation talks about five “hazardous attitudes” that make plan continuation bias more likely:
All of these can mean that we’re more likely to press on than to pause, turn back, or “go around”.
Organisational Examples: Projects, Products, and OKRs
In product teams this shows up all the time. We might carry on building a feature even after a competitor has released something better and captured most of the market. We may stick to an OKR even though conditions have shifted and the objective is no longer a good idea. We become so fixated on achieving the “key result” that we stop asking whether it’s still a useful or sensible result.
If the objective is the summit and the key result is “Reach the summit camp by 3pm”, what happens when a storm rolls in at midday?
In other cases in organisations, we simply keep burning money and time on a project that clearly won’t deliver the hoped-for return. Often because the goal has been cascaded from “higher up”, and as with symbolic goal fixation, not hitting it is framed as failure. “We said we’d deliver X by date Y” becomes more important than checking “Is X still the right thing to do?” This pressure intensifies when goals are publicly announced, a tactic often intended to “motivate” teams to deliver but which frequently drives teams to chase the original commitment rather than pursue the best outcome
Without psychological safety and sound decision practices, teams will often keep climbing to the summit because that’s the OKR, even when it’s clearly unsafe or pointless.
Plan continuation bias is dangerous because it becomes a feedback loop:
Research in aviation suggests that a large proportion of decision errors, (some suggest the majority of errors) are essentially plan continuation errors: pressing on when the safer option was to stop, divert, or go around. Charles West wrote about this goal proximity dynamic in “The Barn Door Effect”: pilots who would normally deviate widely around severe convective weather while en route often continue final approaches directly beneath dangerous thunderstorms when landing, simply because they can see the runway (the “barn door”) and because aircraft ahead of them have done so successfully (social proof of the Normalisation of Risk).
This certainly isn’t unique to pilots. It’s fundamental to how humans behave in dynamic, uncertain environments.
Psychological safety doesn’t magically remove plan continuation bias, but it can provide some counter-pressure that helps to interrupt this feedback loop. In groups with higher psychological safety, people are generally more willing to say things like “Are we still doing the right thing?”, and point out issues like a storm coming or a competitor’s similar product launch. People feel safer in pulling the Andon Cord, call to Stop Work, or suggest a go-around.
However, in teams with lower psychological safety, plan continuation bias is structurally reinforced, because people are more likely to stay silent with those insights, perspectives or concerns. If we’re in a team with low psychological safety, we don’t want to disrupt the group harmony, offend someone in power, or risk damaging our own status or reputation. We may end up pressing ahead not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it feels less interpersonally risky than challenging the plan itself.
Plan continuation bias is a deeply human tendency shaped by many different cognitive biases and heuristics, so we can’t eradicate it, but we can reduce its impact through some practical approaches:
1. Define exit criteria in advance. We agree in advance that if certain criteria are met, we stop, change direction, or take an opportunity to re-evaluate. For example, if a competitor releases an equivalent or potentially better product, we reconsider the business case. Or if certain safety thresholds are crossed – deteriorating weather conditions or issues with the equipment – we pause or “go around”. Pre-defining the criteria for interrupting the loop takes some of the emotional and interpersonal load off making the call in the moment.
2. Establish decision points at regular intervals. Similar to above, we can also build in regular check-in points to re-evaluate and consider “Should we still be doing this?” or simply regularly ask ourselves “Do we continue, pivot, or stop?”. If we were climbing a mountain, we may check in every 30 minutes and simply ask “Are we all still good to go?” The point is to deliberately reopen the question, not simply assume the plan is still valid.
3. Invite dissent explicitly. Sometimes called “devil’s advocate”, but I prefer the less evocative and more straightforward practice of “inviting dissent” by asking things like “What are we missing?”, “How could we see this differently?”, or even “We’re not leaving this meeting until we’ve heard five reasons why this is a bad idea.” We may even designate a small “red team” whose job is to be strategically awkward: to poke holes in the plan and look for reasons we shouldn’t continue.
4. Train people to recognise hazardous attitudes. This is deeper work, often part of CRM and similar training, to help people notice these hazardous attitudes emerging – in themselves and in others. That might include an inappropriate bias to action, a sense of invulnerability, resignation or resistance to authority. The aim isn’t to blame or single people out, but to build shared literacy and the skill to spot and respond to the attitudes that make continuation bias more likely.
5. Build diverse teams. The more diverse the team in background, expertise, perspectives, and experience, the more likely it is that people in the team will see what others have missed. Diversity, in its many facets, increases the chances that someone will notice the storm building on the horizon.
6. Finally, normalise and reward course correction. This is perhaps the biggest cultural shift, and the most impactful (but rather more difficult, organisationally). Stopping, cancelling, or changing course when it no longer makes sense to continue should be seen as success, not failure. That might look like celebrating teams who say, “This project no longer makes sense so we’re stopping it and moving onto something of higher value,” or explicitly rewarding people who highlight new risks or factors reducing the value of a project. Storytelling can be a powerful tool here too, by having open discussions about times when not continuing saved money, delivered greater value, or saved lives. Fundamentally, changing the plan should be framed as competent, expert, adaptive behaviour, not as failure.
Reflecting on this piece, I’d describe plan continuation bias like this:
Plan continuation bias is the cognitive, emotional and social tendency to stick with an established plan even when new information or changing conditions mean it no longer makes sense, is unlikely to deliver value, or increases risk to intolerable levels. It’s amplified by confirmation bias, workload and pressure, ever higher sunk costs and proximity to the goal, symbolic goal fixation, power dynamics, and the myriad interpersonal risks of challenging the plan; and it often leads individuals and teams to press on long after they should adapt or stop.
And sometimes, avoiding it is as simple (and as difficult) as admitting that you might be too poorly to drive across the country and deliver a workshop.
Managing Plan Continuation Bias with Mike Adolph on the Delivering Adventure Podcast
Orasanu, J., Martin, L., Davison, J. and Null, C.H., 1998, January. Errors in aviation decision making: Bad decisions or bad luck?. In Fourth Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20020063485/downloads/20020063485.pdf
“Just a Routine Operation” Martin Bromiley.
Continuation Bias: SKYbrary Aviation Safety. https://skybrary.aero/articles/continuation-bias
West, C.A., 2009. The “Barn Door” Effect. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology. https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/162457.pdf
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Most people who’ve been to school (and many who haven’t!) have strong opinions about education. Understandably so – education speaks to how we raise our children, what we value as a society and the kind of world we want to create. Education matters.
But it also creates a challenge. When you’re teaching, or doing any of the many wonderful roles working directly with students, you find yourself fielding a lot of these opinions about your teaching practice from people who don’t have direct experience of teaching in your context. That’s to be expected. The harder part is that you’re also navigating educational policies and decisions made by people a long way from the classroom. You’re working at what safety scientists call the sharp end.
The language of sharp end and blunt end comes from safety science (James Reason’s Human Error, Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents, Sidney Dekker’s Field Guide to Human Error, Rasmussen and others). It’s a way of describing how work happens in complex systems:
While those working at the blunt end may well make errors or bad decisions, the consequences of those decisions will often only become visible at the sharp end of work.
Back when I was teaching, nobody talked about sharp or blunt ends (except perhaps in the context of pencils!). We said things like, “working at the chalk face” or, worse, the militaristic “on the front line.” But the sharp/blunt distinction really does help explain some of what happens in education.
Teachers and teaching assistants are working at the sharp end, with students. At the blunt end are senior leaders, governors, exam boards and politicians shaping the policies and processes that govern classroom life.
And while we rarely consider education as a safety-critical domain, this is probably somewhat naive. Some of my colleagues who work in especially challenging and complex educational contexts will tell you that their work can be hazardous, managing behaviour that could escalate, caring for students with significant needs, or simply coping with the chronic risks of stress and burnout. But even setting that aside, the sharp/blunt distinction matters. Because when decisions at the blunt end are disconnected from the reality of the sharp end, the gap creates unintended consequences.
By Jade Garratt
Here’s one example. A school leader notices that students’ books haven’t been marked up to date. Instead of asking why, they introduce a new policy: every book must show evidence of marking at least once a fortnight.
What happens next?
The result is almost the opposite of what was intended. The policy was meant to support learning, but at the sharp end it undermined it.
So what could have happened instead? Here’s where Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) thinking is useful. In HOP, we try to become more “operationally curious”: getting closer to the sharp end of work before jumping to solutions.
That might have looked like this:
With that curiosity, leaders might find that feedback is already happening effectively through conversations, whole-class discussions or verbal comments. They might discover that teachers want to be doing more written marking, but they’re overloaded with planning lessons for a new exam syllabus. Or they could uncover duplication – teachers marking in one way for students and again in another system for accountability – leaving them without the capacity to do either well. Or they may find something else entirely.
The point is that unless we’re genuinely curious (rather than judgemental) about what’s going on at the sharp end, we risk fixing the wrong problem. The real insights come from understanding work as done – not just how we imagine it or how it’s written in policy, but the messy, adaptive and creative ways people at the sharp end actually do their jobs. There is a difference between teaching as imagined, and teaching as done.
And depending what leaders learn from this operational curiosity, the solution could be quite different: giving teachers more time, removing other workload, investing in technology for audio feedback – or perhaps deciding no new policy or action is needed at all.
The sharp/blunt distinction is a useful metaphor, and can help us see work systemically. It reminds us that what looks like “non-compliance” or “error” at the sharp end is often shaped by the conditions created at the blunt end. And it nudges us to be curious, to go and see, before we act.
And there’s another reason I value this language. Unlike more traditional leadership language, talking about people “at the top” and others “at the bottom,” the sharp/blunt metaphor doesn’t carry that same sense of hierarchy. It’s not about who’s on top, it’s about where you stand in relation to the work. Both vantage points matter, and both are essential to the system working well.
Whatever domain we’re in, we can probably benefit from this lesson: pay attention to both the sharp end and the blunt end, and especially to the gap between them. That’s where valuable learning, and change, can really happen.
Further Reading
Work as Imagined vs Work as Done
Making it safe(r) to fail in teaching
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