Safety professionals across Australia are getting increasingly excited about group learning practices for safety improvement, such as 'learning teams'. They are motivated to introduce these new practices to their organisation either as an addition to or replacement for longstanding safety activities such as incident investigations, despite scant theoretical or empirical research about their functioning or implementation. This research asks the question how are organisations in Australia adopting group learning practices for safety improvement?

This question was explored using institutional ethnographic interviews with safety professionals and organisational managers who have past experience adopting group learning practices for safety improvement across three organisations. This revealed the everyday work involved and the forces that shaped these informants work.

Informants engage in a significant amount of 'convincing work' of stakeholders, to get group learning started. They do this by bringing in outsiders with outside ideas, which informants then need to mix and synthesise to be suitably convincing for their stakeholders and organisational context.

The adoption of group learning practices involved informants both enduring and creating ‘struggles’. These struggles appeared when organisational stakeholders pre-existing worldviews were challenged by new concepts supportive of group learning. People also struggled with the new practices criticising or supplanting existing practices (such as investigations). People struggled with more nuanced challenges such as reducing or removing blame and punishment, or realising more clearly how work was actually done versus how it was imagined.

Informants were criticised for their lack of action implementing new practices, yet getting started imperfectly likewise caused problems. Their work was also affected by existing safety systems, often disconnected from but still dependent on these systems.

This research makes an early empirical contribution to literature which helps safety professionals seeking to effectively implement group learning practices in their organisation. It illuminates some of the many forces acting upon and harnessed by professionals, forces which are largely obscured or invisible in existing grey literature accounts of group learning practices for safety improvement.