Preaccident Investigation Podcast

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.

Todd Conklin talks with Corey Pitzer about fatality prevention, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), and how safety thinking has shifted globally. They explore controversial views—treating workers as problem-solvers, tensions between engineering/energy-based approaches and systemic/new-view thinking—and use real examples to show why designing systems that absorb variation matters more than trying to eliminate risk.

Todd interviews Professor David Woods about recent NASA mishaps and a growing cultural shift toward "cheaper, faster" decision-making that sacrifices safety. They explore how past safety gains have lost vitality, highlight cascading modern risks (the "messy nine"), and argue for mutual assistance and revitalized resilience practices. Wood's most recent writing on this is available in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists called:  Cheaper, Faster, and Who Gives a Damn about Anything Else. The episode connects space, aviation, cloud outages, and AI-driven engineering to show why coordinated foresight and cross-disciplinary cooperation are essential to prevent far-reaching harm in today’s complex systems.

In this episode, Todd Conklin joins Amir Shahzad to discuss human and organizational performance, resilience, and how to design systems that allow failures to be caught and recovered before they become disasters. They explore the gap between work as imagined and work as done, the value of learning from everyday work, and practical steps leaders can take to create safer, more resilient workplaces. They also cover cultural change, the role of procedures, adaptive behavior, and the potential—and risks—of AI in safety, all delivered with a mix of practical advice and light-hearted rapid-fire questions.

Hosts Todd and Brent discuss an upcoming restorative workshop centered on RaDonda Vought's account of the Emory Hospital event. The episode highlights how normal performance variability can combine into serious failures, the value of storytelling, and the importance of learning and building resilience across complex systems. The workshop in Santa Fe (March 31–April 1) invites healthcare and high‑risk industry professionals to move from “what” happened to “how” to apply lessons in practice. For more information or to register, contact officetoddconklin@gmail.com.

Host Todd Conklin interviews fatigue expert Mark Rosekind, PhD about his path from sleep research to roles at NASA, the NTSB, and NHTSA, and how sleep science applies across transportation and safety-critical work. Key takeaways: think of sleep like a bank account (sleep debt), "start in the black" before major schedule changes, the benefits of strategic naps, and systemic ways organizations can reduce fatigue to improve performance, health, and safety.

Todd Conklin discusses VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Adaptation) and argues that innovation and safety improve when organizations embrace uncertainty and gather more diverse information and perspectives. He mixes personal travel and Olympics anecdotes, touches on aviation and healthcare examples, and invites listeners to a hands-on workshop to explore these ideas further.

In this clip from the Pre‑Accident Investigation Podcast and Punk Rock Safety, Todd joins Ron, Ben, and David to debate why safety innovation is stalling, where new ideas are coming from, and who’s pushing practice forward. They explore barriers like regulatory pressure, the pull of “normal,” and the difference between improving safety and redesigning work. Using examples from pediatric intensive care and other domains, the conversation highlights pockets of progress, the danger of idea corruption, and the need to embrace experimentation, rethink systems, and find the next generation of thinkers to advance safety practice.

This episode tells the real-life story of how the Society for Patient Safety and a network of children’s hospitals used learning teams, proactive safety huddles, and simulations to reduce unplanned extubations in neonatal ICUs — cutting rates by 60% and preventing thousands of deaths. It covers the data, the frontline-led solutions, the narrowing of racial disparities, and an invitation to a small conference in Santa Fe to learn and share improvement practices.

This episode previews a small workshop in Santa Fe where Todd Conklin, Ann Lyren, and guest ReDonda Vaught will explore a tragic patient safety case. They frame accidents as the unexpected combination of normal performance variability and discuss how to learn from such incidents. Listeners will hear about the meeting goals (March 31–April 1), opportunities to chart the event, and practical tactics for organizations to identify and respond to accumulating risks, with cross-industry lessons and a focus on improving safety culture.

Todd Conklin breaks down why accountability is an act of clarity, not blame or discipline, and why leaders and workers share responsibility for operational safety. He highlights the need to set roles before incidents occur, contrasts accountability with performance management, and announces a case-study workshop about Redonda’s Vanderbilt story in Santa Fe (March 31–April 1).

Todd Conklin explores why its so difficult to measure events that never happen and how traditional safety metrics can mislead organizations. He argues for focusing on metrics that validate safeguards and create desired outcomes rather than only counting accidents. The episode also touches on automation risks, the limits of frequency-based measures, and the need for better leading indicators and verification practices to keep systems safe even when nothing appears to go wrong.

Todd Conklin opens 2026 reflecting on why how we begin interactions and jobs matters more than we often realize. He uses stories from travel, aviation, and workplace examples to show that the start of an encounter often predicts its outcome. Conklin urges listeners to choose kindness, psychological safety, and deliberate planning—start the job when the right controls are in place—rather than beginning from hate, division, or aggression. He links these opening choices to organizational resilience, safety, and reliability. The episode is a New Year’s call to focus on how we start conversations and work: start safe, be kind, and build cultures that help people succeed in difficult and high-risk environments.

10. New Year’s Eve recap reflecting on a busy 2016 and the journey ahead into 2017. 9. Host shares personal travel highlights and experiments in gratitude and generosity. 8. Announces a 2017 focus on seeking and affirming the fundamental goodness in people. 7. Reviews safety’s evolution: from compliance (Safety One) to safety-by-design (process safety). 6. Explains the current phase emphasizing human performance and managing variability rather than blaming workers. 5. Notes that incidents have become rarer and traditional metrics are less predictive. 4. Discusses fatalities as outlier events that require different thinking and study. 3. Invites listeners to run small sociological experiments to improve everyday interactions. 2. Celebrates the collective progress in safety and the privilege of contributing to that change. 1. Ends with a New Year’s wish: be with each other, keep managing uncertainty wisely, and have a great 2017.

This special Thanksgiving 2021 episode shares one simple piece of advice: be grateful. It highlights the power of gratitude during hard times and encourages you to pause and appreciate what you have. When the world feels difficult, instead of meeting pain with pain, reflect on the people, support, and good things in your life. Gratitude helps you move forward with strength and perspective. Learn something every day, have fun, and be good to each other.

In this episode Todd Conklin uses the season of gift-giving to explain near-miss reporting: why it matters, how it shows whether controls worked or luck saved the day, and how organizations should respond with gratitude and learning—not punishment.

This episode shifts the safety conversation from continuous improvement to continuous capacity, introducing a practical dashboard of 10 operational indicators—five system capacities (exposure to unforgiving energy, robustness of safeguards, error tolerance/recoverability, detectability of variance, and recovery capacity) and five human capacities (sensitivity to variation, frontline insight, quality of learning, psychological safety, and supervisor load). Host Todd Conklin explains how these measurable and observable indicators link engineering controls with human and organizational factors, and why monitoring them regularly helps leaders improve resilience and manage high‑risk operations more effectively.