Get to know Joe Estey, Sr:

Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-estey-9905515a/

Email: [email protected]      See an older, but still pertinent webinar with Joe: Fooled by Counting—Why the Scale is Not Your Friend

Website: www.CHOLearning.org (Joe serves on the Board of Directors, Community of Human and Organizational Learning)

Joe Estey provides several powerful strategies for reshaping organizational learning, reducing bureaucracy, and improving human performance.

Here are the key lessons we learn from his approach:

Learning from Everyday Successes

Estey stresses the importance of learning from normal, everyday activities rather than waiting to learn exclusively from mistakes. He notes that if an organization only attempts to learn from failures, they will simply get more opportunities to make them. Instead, leaders should proactively study teams that are successfully meeting their expectations and successfully managing everyday challenges.

Rethinking the "Vehicles" for Learning

Many companies invest heavily in formal "lessons learned" databases or required reading programs that workers never actually read; often, these systems exist simply to meet a bureaucratic deadline. Estey suggests that true operational learning happens through informal crew meetings and ongoing conversations, where workers naturally discuss what happened yesterday to prepare for today.

To institutionalize this knowledge for future or newly hired workers, he recommends:

Combating "Safety Clutter" Through Subtraction

Drawing on the concept of the "Scarcity Brain," Estey explains that humans have an innate drive to constantly add things to solve problems. In the workplace, this results in a dangerous "cumulative effect" of endlessly adding new rules, corrective actions, and procedural steps (often referred to as "safety clutter").

Estey challenges teams to overcome this instinct by routinely asking, "What do we need to take away in order to help make this more productive and safe?". By treating subtraction as a form of addition, organizations can simplify overly complex processes—such as avoiding situations where a single lock-out/tag-out tag requires 14 different people to touch it.

The Systemic "Undo Button"

Finally, Estey highlights that in some situations, the best corrective action is to do absolutely nothing. Every job carries an expected baseline error rate, and when minor mistakes happen that do not lead to severe consequences, organizations shouldn't force formal investigations or reports. Instead, businesses need to build a systemic "undo button"—much like in a word processor—where workers can simply recognize a minor mistake, correct it, learn, and move on without treating it like a catastrophe.

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