ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Todd Conklin doesn't think safety is about preventing failure. He thinks it's about being ready to recover from it.
Todd — 30 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a senior advisor for organisational and safety culture, author of 14 books including The 5 Principles of Human Performance, host of Pre-Accident Investigation: The Podcast for over 12 years, and widely considered the godfather of HOP — joins Mousa to unpack why the best safety systems assume failure everywhere, and what database administrators, hospital researchers, and London bus drivers have quietly been teaching the safety industry for years.
The conversation centres on Kathleen Sutcliffe's research on patient deaths in hospitals: people don't die because of exposure to risk, they die because of a failure to rescue. From there, Todd walks through the reframes that follow — life-saving "rules" should be life-saving "controls," because one word puts the weight on the worker and the other puts it back on the system. "Stop work" should be "start when you're ready," because if you're counting on a worker to stop a job before it kills them, every other control already failed. And "speak up" programs are half-built without "listen up" — the question isn't whether workers are telling you the truth, it's whether you've built anything that lets you listen.
In this episode:
- Why the best safety systems are designed to assume failure, not prevent it
- Kathleen Sutcliffe's "failure to rescue" research, and what it means for how you measure risk
- Life-saving "rules" vs. life-saving "controls" — and why the word choice matters
- Why "stop work" is broken, and what "start when you're ready" replaces it with
- How blame — including self-blame — quietly kills organisational learning
- The London bus strike, "work to rule," and why you want thinking compliance, not rote compliance
- It's not about the speak. It's about the up.
⏱️ Chapters
00:00 Introduction — the godfather of HOP
02:05 12 years of podcasting, and why human performance is "what's next"
06:24 Los Alamos: keeping the margin between disaster and normal as wide as possible
10:30 What database administrators taught Todd about systems thinking
15:11 Chaos monkeys — and the engineer who beta-tests by sitting on his keyboard
21:31 Why aren't they called eight life-saving controls?
22:44 Kathleen Sutcliffe and "failure to rescue"
27:13 Why "stop work" doesn't work
28:23 Start when you're ready, not stop before you fail
31:02 How blame stops organisations from learning
36:53 A well-designed system is invisible
39:34 The London bus strike: what "work to rule" tells us about real work
45:19 Closing — it's not about the speak. It's about the up.
🔗 Connect
Todd Conklin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-conklin-64b8a8a/
Podcast: Pre-Accident Investigation: The Podcast ·
Books: The 5 Principles of Human Performance and 13 others — search "Todd Conklin" on Amazon
Host: Mousa Yassin — linkedin.com/in/mousayassin
Pixaera: pixaera.com
Safety Heroes is the Health, Safety & Environment podcast by Pixaera.
New episodes every other week.
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