Strategic and Organisational Learning

Helping your organisation learn from what happens — and use that learning to build a stronger, safer and more resilient business.

Why organisational learning matters

Every incident, near miss and audit finding is an opportunity to learn. But in most organisations, that learning doesn't happen — or it stops at a corrective action on a spreadsheet.

Strategic and organisational learning is about building the systems, behaviours and culture that turn events into genuine, lasting improvement. It's how you move from reactive compliance — fixing things after they go wrong — to a proactive safety culture where your people are engaged, informed and continuously improving.

For growing and multi-site businesses, this is especially important. As your organisation scales, the risks of knowledge being lost, lessons being siloed, and mistakes being repeated increase significantly.

A structured approach to learning is what keeps your safety culture strong as your business evolves.

Who this is for

Strategic and organisational learning is particularly valuable for organisations that:

Are growing and need their safety culture to scale with them
Have experienced repeat incidents or near misses and want to break the cycle
Want to move beyond compliance towards a genuine learning culture
Have an internal H&S lead who would benefit from coaching and mentoring
Need their senior leadership team to engage more meaningfully with health and safety

"We wanted to review our permit to work process and engaged Orchard Safety to help. Right from the start Sam suggested a slightly different approach to the review and encouraged us to involve key stakeholders and the senior leadership safety team in a learning workshop.

The result, a permit to work process that complements our working with contractors process and helps operational sites manage risk, rather than managing a process that had become ineffective and burdensome."

Head of Health and Safety, Manufacturing

Our Safety Programme

Are you ready to get curious?

Our Safety Programme is a great opportunity for you to acknowledge and accept the honest reality of any health and safety shortfalls you may have and develop action for change. It’s the best way to commit to improvement knowing we’ll keep you accountable.

This is perfect for organisations looking to manage health and safety differently, shifting to a more proactive approach that is more engaging and people centric. Involving your people along the way sends a powerful message that they are valued and protected.

As part of this service, we work with all levels of your organisation to really get under the skin of existing cultures and how safety is perceived. We then use our experience and knowledge to evolve what you do into a comprehensive and proactive approach.

1

Business Leaders

We spend a day with your business leaders to set the scene for the safety programme.

During the workshop we deep dive into:

Defining the problem and why we need to change.
Establishing desired aims and objectives.
Understanding what’s not working and why.
Discussing what good safety looks like and how are we going to get there.

2

Operational Leaders

We spend the day exploring health and safety from the perspective of your managers.

This organisational layer is often one of the most influential and can also be a change blocker if not engaged and motivated to get involved.

We focus on making it real for them by exploring how their roles currently influence safety and whether their visions align with those of the business leaders.

The session is packed with the introduction of non-technical skills that can be used to help bring the safety programme to life.

Topics include:

• What does good safety look like
• Culture vs. compliance
• Where they fit within the proactive approach
• Event learning and response

3

Employees

We now spend time at the sharp end of operations and involve those that are doing the work. This is where we get a true insight into how safety integrates itself into your everyday operations.

We discuss the challenges - the bits we don’t want to hear - and encourage complete honesty and transparency. This is critical to ensure everyone knows we’re genuine about doing things differently. It’s a bit of an ‘amnesty’ before we start to introduce new ways of working.

Of course, like any situation where we want openness and honesty, the power of these workshops lies in our ability to create a ‘safe’ environment, where all employees are encouraged to speak up and get involved.

4

Feedback Loop

The themes and trends that have been discussed throughout the workshops are presented back to the operational and business leaders to find out whether they align.

Often, they don’t, but this is about being brutally honest and using this information and any gaps we identify to implement real and lasting change.

We will continue to support you through this exciting but challenging journey, always drawing on our experience and knowledge to ensure what feels like a huge task is achievable and can be delivered within an acceptable timeframe.

Learning Workshops

Workshops are delivered to ‘Learning Teams’ as a facilitated means of engaging with a mix of leaders, managers, and employees. We work with them to help them understand, and then learn from, the opportunities that are presented by everyday successful and safe work, as well as learning from any events or incidents.

Work together to find the challenges and the bits that don’t work

Map out the process

Identify opportunities for improvement

Implement the changes required

Measure and review the impact

We begin by mapping out the current processes to establish the desired, or ‘imagined’, way of working as compared to the way things are actually done.

We work together as a group to understand what a good day looks like, what a bad day looks like, from a culture and behaviours perspective, and how each element of the process could be made easier….and safer.

By this stage, we have walls full of flipchart paper and post-it-notes, all of which are an opportunity for improvement. Different processes, different people and different environments will require different solutions. We use the information provided to identify the best course of action.

Micro-experiments can be used during and after the workshop to test and implement solutions that provide an opportunity to measure the impact of any proposed change. We continue to talk to employees and involve them in the process to ensure the project is people-led.

Our Strategic and Organisational Learning Support package is a thorough and highly effective approach to overhauling your health and safety culture.

We genuinely feel privileged to work with organisations that want to invest time and effort to understand whether their systems are truly effective and reflect the reality of their operations.

Our learning workshops are challenging but we have a mantra that “being comfortable getting uncomfortable” is incredibly rewarding and a true catalyst to start working towards what good safety looks like. It’s probably one of the most enlightening and important processes you will ever encounter in your business.

Want to know more?

Get in Touch

Strategic Learning FAQs

What is organisational learning in health and safety? Organisational learning is the process of systematically learning from incidents, near misses, audits and everyday operations to improve your health and safety performance. It goes beyond individual corrective actions to address the underlying systems, behaviours and culture that influence safety outcomes.

How is this different from incident investigation? Incident investigation is one part of organisational learning — it's how you understand what happened and why. But true organisational learning also includes how you communicate findings, embed changes, build feedback loops and develop a culture where learning is continuous, not just triggered by events.

Can you coach our internal H&S person? Yes. We provide ongoing coaching and mentoring for internal H&S leads and teams. This is designed to build their confidence, capability and strategic thinking — helping them grow from a compliance-focused role into a genuine driver of safety improvement within your organisation.

Do we need to have had incidents to benefit from this? Not at all. The best time to build a learning culture is before something goes wrong. Proactive learning — from audits, inspections, near misses and everyday observations — is far more effective than waiting for an incident to trigger change.

Can this be part of retained support? Absolutely. Strategic and organisational learning is one of the most valuable components of our Blueprint retained support. Your named consultant can embed learning into your annual plan, provide ongoing coaching and ensure continuous improvement is happening — not just being talked about.