PreAccident Investigation Podcast

Todd Conklin reviews Erik Hollnagel’s new book "Incremental Safety Practices" and explains the core idea that safety efforts fall into two approaches: reductive (removing hazards) and inductive (building resilient systems). He urges listeners to view safety as an ongoing capacity managed in everyday work rather than a static goal achieved after eliminating risks.

The episode invites organizations to reflect on whether their programs focus on hazard removal, resilience building, or both, and emphasizes paying attention to incremental improvements (or erosions) in safety culture and practice.

Host Todd Conklin talks with Daniel Hummerdahl about his new book, An Invitation to Safety Conversation, exploring how everyday safety talks can move beyond scripted checklists to become learning moments that bridge leaders and workers.

The episode shares practical stories and techniques for asking better questions, listening more, and scaling conversational practices across organizations to improve safety, trust, and performance.

Coming into this episode, Todd Conklin welcomes Al Thomson to discuss safety in the primary sector, focusing on migrant Pacific workers and a human-centered approach. Al shares how Monarch Platform blends pastoral care, cultural understanding, and contemporary safety (HOP) to support a diverse workforce across New Zealand’s agriculture and horticulture industries.

The conversation covers cultural differences in risk perception, village success planning, measuring workforce capacity with role-specific “bingo” competencies, and the importance of humility, vulnerability, and leadership in creating meaningful safety outcomes.

Host Todd chats with Mousa Yassin about shifting safety culture from blaming individuals to designing systems that tolerate failure and recover quickly. They cover life-saving rules, the concept of recoverability, lessons from software engineering like chaos testing, and the importance of learning over punishment.

The episode emphasizes practical ways to build resilient systems, nurture learning teams, and make safety training engaging and effective.

Todd Conklin tells the origin story of "learning teams," sparked by a self-reported near-miss at Los Alamos involving a postdoc and an arcing wrench. Rather than pursuing a punitive investigation, a group of workers gathered to identify what needed to be learned, uncovering broader gaps in postdoc training and safety planning.

The episode explains how learning teams prioritize asking better questions, collecting the right data, and designing system-focused solutions. Conklin describes how this approach spread across the lab and why it remains a fast, effective tool for operational improvement.