PreAccident Investigation Podcast

Host Todd interviews his mother, Gyla Conklin, who recounts a true 1933 encounter when her father, Bill Brock, and friends were held up by Bonnie and Clyde near Meade, Kansas. The episode highlights a dramatic rescue at a park, a croquet mallet that saved the day, and a family newspaper account.

Short, vivid, and personal, this episode underscores why recording family stories matters and offers a human look at a famous criminal sto...

Todd Conklin talks with Rob Fisher about how leadership, workforce shifts and compassion are reshaping safety and reliability. They explore why organizations must move from fixing problems to improving systems, and how worker engagement becomes the key source of learning.

The episode covers practical approaches—small experiments, better leader conversations, and data from observations (TEDS)—that help leaders act differ...

In this episode Todd Conklin explores the paradox of procedures: they keep work stable but also limit flexibility. He explains how procedures can be both necessary and constraining in high-risk, high-consequence environments.

Todd highlights the value of incremental safety—making small, thoughtful changes over time—while building communities of practice to better prepare organizations for an uncertain future.

He closes ...

Todd Conklin talks with Gilval Menezes about Brazil’s growing movement to adopt the New View of safety: translating resources into Portuguese, building community, publishing a field guide, and running learning teams to shift culture away from blame.

They discuss practical work on HOP implementation, the cultural challenges of translation, the urgency driven by workplace fatality rates, and the push to develop methods that fit...

Todd chats with Ron Gantt about the future of safety — from AI-driven pre-task tools to the limits of rote checklists — and why listening to frontline workers matters more than ever. They explore leadership’s role in shaping responses to incidents, bridging power gaps with contractors, and designing systems that actually support real work.

Through examples from healthcare to construction and candid anecdotes, the ...

In this part two conversation, Todd Conklin and Bob Edwards explore what the future holds for operational learning and safety. They discuss learning teams, storytelling, the power of curiosity and not-knowing, and how the people closest to the work provide the best solutions.

The episode highlights successes from pediatric patient safety, the Navy, and industry examples, and emphasizes cultural shifts away from quick fixes and metr...

In this episode, Todd Conklin questions whether risk can ever truly be removed or if it simply moves around. He distinguishes between hazards and risk, discusses how organizations shift risk through contracting and worker practices, and argues that while hazards can be managed, risk remains dynamic and persistent. Todd also highlights the role of controls, barriers, and margin in starting work safely, and teases upcoming conversati...

Todd Conklin interviews Martha Acosta, a pioneer in human performance and instructional design, about using organizational "pain points" and paradoxes as early indicators of system failures. They discuss why near misses and workplace frustrations are valuable signals and how leaders can turn those tensions into opportunities for learning and improvement.

The episode offers practical advice for managers: be present, look for pressur...

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 p...

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 perceptio...

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 enga...

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...

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 ris...

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:  ...

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, th...