Claim OwnershipPreAccident Investigation Podcast
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The Pre Accident Podcast is an ongoing safety podcast conversation of Human Performance, Systems Safety, & Safety Culture.
1124 Episodes
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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.
Todd Conklin talks with Brent Sutton and Jeff Lyth about the upcoming HOP Workshop in Vancouver (Jan 28–29, 2026), centered on Redonda’s powerful firsthand story of patient safety, complex systems, restorative justice and resilience — lessons that translate across industries.
Day one features Redonda’s narrative and panel discussion; day two focuses on hands‑on learning and innovation. Please attend, this workshop will be amazingly good for the soul!
For tickets and details visit hopconference.com.
This episode explores human performance and aviation safety, contrasting airline procedures with general aviation risks. Guests discuss building safety margins, the importance of planning vs. acting, and how economic pressures can erode resilience.
Highlights include treating near-misses as learning opportunities, practical tips for pilots to increase recoverability, and real-world examples from naval operations and long-term flying experience.
Jay Allen interviews Todd Conklin about his new book, The Stability Trap, exploring why even safe, stable organizations can fail. They discuss the "drive to zero," complacency, pressures on middle management, wearables and data, and lessons from aviation and the pandemic.
The episode also covers how AI was used to reorganize the book’s ideas and help craft its ending, and offers practical reframes: treat safety as a capacity, see workers as system monitors, and retool systems to match capacity with risk. The book is available now.
Host Todd introduces his new book, The Stability Trap, and shares a sneak peek episode created with an AI-generated interview. The episode explores why organizations that appear safe can still experience accidents and how success itself can erode safety capacity.
The discussion outlines the core ideas: safety as the presence of capacity, the three R's (redefine safety, reframe the worker, relearn investigation), and a five-stage practical blueprint for leaders, safety professionals, frontline workers, supervisors, and system integration.
Short and practical, the episode is a teaser for the book and invites listeners to reflect on whether their organizations maintain the resilience, confidence, and systems needed to recover when things go wrong.
In this episode Todd Conklin joins Jowanza Joseph to explore modern safety thinking: why human error is normal, how context shapes behavior, and why leadership response and system recoverability matter more than blame.
They draw on examples from Los Alamos, AWS outages, SpaceX and everyday technology to show how organizations can design systems that tolerate failure and learn from it.
Listeners will get practical insights into the five principles of human performance and how to build resilient systems that fail safely and recover quickly.
Todd Conklin joins the Brisbane Safety Differently Book Lab in Auckland for a lively discussion about leadership, accountability, and learning from everyday work. The group explores why safety is the presence of control, how leaders should respond after incidents, and why learning is the new currency of safety.
Todd shares stories about writing his books, engaging with workers, and practical steps leaders can take to build confidence and capacity while fostering a learning culture.
Part two of the RaDonda Vaught story examines what emerged after the event: investigation details, system design flaws, communication breakdowns, and the tiny timing error that mattered. RaDonda Vaught recounts how normalized overrides, software defaults, and organizational assumptions created conditions for failure.
The episode explores the chilling effects of criminalizing mistakes, the human cost across patients and providers, and the case for shifting from blame to system-focused learning and improvement.
1In this episode, nurse RaDonda Vaught tells the detailed, context-rich story of a medication error at Vanderbilt that led to criminal charges. She walks through the events, system issues (including a recent EHR rollout and medication-dispensing delays), distractions, and decision points that contributed to the mistake.
RaDonda describes how workarounds, unclear documentation in radiology, drug supply changes, and interruptions combined to produce a tragic outcome, and she explains the immediate clinical response. The episode sets up a follow-up discussion about what was learned and how systems can be improved.
Episode: an extended open Q&A from the Pre-Accident Investigation Conference in Santa Fe covering big-picture safety topics.
Speakers discuss the limits of traditional metrics, the power of real-time monitoring, shifting focus from managing risk to maintaining control, validating controls in the field, learning teams, contractor relationships, and prioritizing high-information events. Anecdotes and practical guidance illustrate how organizations can learn without blame.
Todd Conklin explores how blame shuts down learning and prevents organizational improvement, arguing that blaming individuals creates a chilling effect that blocks thousands of future learning opportunities.
He connects blame to misunderstandings about human error, emphasizes psychological safety, and urges leaders to ask "what failed" before asking "who failed," while sharing personal anecdotes and reflections.
Todd Conklin and Brent Sutton discuss the short-term future of safety thinking—covering the rise and fall of lean/TQM, how commodification can slow innovation, and why fear, FOMO and complacency shape which ideas stick. They explore leaders' responsibility, weak signals, and the need for small 'safe-to-fail' experiments to keep systems resilient.
Set in Santa Fe with lighthearted moments (including breakfast burritos and a cheese debate), the episode blends history, practical insight and a call to stay curious about evolving workplace complexity.
Recorded live at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, this episode features a wide-ranging conversation between Todd and Andy Baker about learning, safety culture, and leadership influence.
They dig into HOP and related safety approaches, debate top-down versus middle-out change, discuss the importance of language and unlearning, and explore how to turn belief into practical skill and behavior.
The episode offers real-world insights on piloting change, engaging leaders and middle managers, and learning from others who have adapted these ideas in novel ways.
Tiny Todd Conklin joins the No Way Out podcast to explore Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), high-reliability organizing, and how safety emerges from complex systems rather than individual mistakes.
They critique traditional investigations, surveys, and risk matrices, and discuss practical ideas for building capacity, worker agency, psychological safety, and resilient operations.
This episode examines the growing problem of children accidentally left in hot cars, explains why memory failures can happen to anyone, and argues that punishment is not the solution.
It summarizes practical approaches—accepting the risk, assuming "when, not if," using technology and visual reminders, and responding with understanding rather than judgment—to create system-level changes that improve recoverability and prevent future tragedies.
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Hi Todd, You really hit the nail on the head in this episode, in relation to the focus on Just culture in recent years, to the detriment of all of the other sub-cultures (Learning, Reporting, Questioning/Informed, Flexible). Exactly this has happened in the organisation for whom I'm working. Just Culture is there in the top-level Safety Policy statement, it's on all the posters, it's even been turned into a procedure ("applying a Just Culture" - you can't 'apply' a culture!).
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Todd. If you read this please could you put specific episode descriptions in for each episode? Thanks!
Brilliant podcast