Human and Organisational Performance: What HOP means and how COMET puts it into practice
Human and Organisational Performance, commonly known as HOP, represents a fundamental shift in how we think about safety, error, and learning in high-risk industries.
Traditional safety thinking often assumes that if something goes wrong, someone must be at fault. HOP takes a different view. It recognises that humans are fallible, that error is a normal part of work, and that the real question isn't "who made the mistake?" but "what conditions allowed that mistake to lead to harm?"
The five principles of HOP
Dr Todd Conklin, one of the leading voices in human performance, defines HOP through five core principles:
People make mistakes. This isn't a flaw to be fixed; it's a fact to be managed. Even experienced, well-trained people will occasionally make an error. The goal is to design systems that can tolerate human error without catastrophic consequences.
Blame fixes nothing. Pointing fingers after an incident might feel satisfying, but it rarely prevents the next one. Worse, it discourages open reporting and drives problems underground. Effective learning requires an environment where people feel safe to speak up.
Context drives behaviour. People don't make decisions in isolation. Fatigue, time pressure, unclear procedures, broken equipment, competing priorities - all of these shape the choices workers make. To understand behaviour, you have to understand the conditions that influenced it.
Learning and improving are vital. Investigations should generate insight, not just accountability. When organisations treat incidents as opportunities to strengthen their systems rather than occasions to assign blame, they become more resilient over time.
How leaders respond to failure matters. The way an organisation reacts when something goes wrong sends a powerful signal. Leaders who respond with curiosity rather than punishment create the conditions for honest reporting and genuine learning.
A lens, not a programme
One of the most important things to understand about HOP is that it isn't a bolt-on initiative or an additional compliance requirement. It's a way of seeing. A lens through which to view the work your people do every day.
Think of it like getting a new prescription for your glasses. Suddenly, you can see things that were always there but never quite in focus: the small workarounds people use to get the job done, the moments where procedures don't quite match reality, the early warning signs that something might go wrong.
When HOP thinking is embedded in how your organisation operates, it becomes easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing. The right thing means achieving your objectives safely. The wrong thing means causing harm to people, assets, and reputation.
Learning from normal work
Traditionally, safety efforts focus on what went wrong. HOP encourages a broader view: learning from what goes right.
Most of the time, work succeeds. People adapt, problem-solve, and navigate complexity without incident. Understanding how they do this, what makes normal work successful, reveals strengths worth preserving and vulnerabilities worth addressing before they cause harm.
This is the essence of proactive safety: not waiting for failure to teach you lessons but actively seeking to understand how your systems perform under real conditions.
Investigations with a HOP mindset
When something does go wrong, a HOP-informed investigation asks different questions. Instead of "who is responsible?", it asks "why did it make sense for a reasonable person to do what they did?"
This isn't about excusing poor behaviour. It's about understanding the system that shaped it. Good people don't come to work intending to cause harm. When they make decisions that lead to unwanted outcomes, there are almost always systemic factors at play, like gaps in training, conflicting priorities, equipment limitations, or procedural ambiguity.
By understanding these factors, organisations can address the conditions that made failure possible, rather than simply removing the individual who was involved.
Building a more resilient organisation
HOP is ultimately about resilience: creating organisations that can absorb variability, adapt to unexpected conditions, and recover from setbacks without catastrophic consequences.
This means designing systems that anticipate human error rather than assuming it away. It means fostering a culture where people feel safe to report problems, raise concerns, and admit when something didn't go to plan. And it means treating every piece of operational data, whether from incidents, near misses, or everyday work, as an opportunity to learn.
When organisations embrace this mindset, safety becomes less about compliance and more about continuous improvement. It becomes part of how work gets done, not something layered on top.
COMET and HOP
COMET supports and helps organisations embrace the HOP philosophy through “COMET Resilience.” This programme brings an innovative forward-thinking solution to enable your organisation to capture learning opportunities through our unique Learning Team toolkit.
Building on our ‘Truth and Trust’ mantra, essential for success, you will engage and enthuse your workforce to understand the drift that exists between work as imagined at the blunt end (Management) and work as done at the sharp end (workers). This powerful insight into everyday work enables powerful learning opportunities before harm occurs and is the perfect incident prevention answer.
Want to learn more?
Explore our Behavioural and Safety Excellence training options
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)