PreAccident Investigation Podcast

This podcast is a fun romp in to the new view of safety and reliability.  Daniel is a safety professional who is solely interested in innovative and restorative ways to manage safe in a large, high-risk operation.  He is smart, clever, and interesting.  You will love this episode.  This episode will make you think about the way your organization thinks about safety in the modern world.  If that was all this podcast did - that would be well-worth listening for a half-hour. But even better still is the fact that Daniel decided a year of so ago to take this excitement around the new view of safety and put it all on a web-site.  Daniel is the founder of "Safety Differently."  This web page is an amazing resource for anyone who is interested in the new view.  If you don't know this webpage, it is time that you do. Safety, High Reliability, Organizational Systems and Daniel.  What a great mix.  Thanks for listening to this episode.  Thanks for listen to all of the episodes.  You make the podcast go!

This comes from the CME meeting in Western Australia.  I have never heard a "welcome to country" before at any conference or meeting in the US.  I was not prepared for the power and effect this welcome would have on me and my fellow meeting attendees.   Mr. McGuire is a masterful story teller, welcomer, and speaker.   His background and life has equipped him for this amazing moment.  Listen carefully to the beauty and warmth and ask yourself, "are we welcoming?"

Kent Whipple is funny.  He is a comedian and new media manager for an Improve Company in Seattle - Unexpected Productions.  He is also very interested in the New View of Human Performance.  Kent knows a lot about what we do and the world we are trying to better understand.  His answer?  It is all about the story.  The story we tell the workers.  The story the workers tell us.  The story of a failure.  The story of Success.  It is all about the story. Kent talks about telling stories and the power that exists in this process.  This is a great podcast and a huge part of the work we do. Safety and safety culture are all about the stories we tell.  Listen to Kent's!!

Safety.  Safety Culture.  High Reliability.  Human Performance.  Safety Systems.  Safety Differently.  New View.  Highly Reliable, Robust System... All of these topics all are connected....by the complexity of the organizations in which we work. You don't simplify complexity - you make is visible.    Listen to this podcast episode and see what you think? Thanks for listening

Workplace Safety, Safety Culture, High Reliability, Operational Excellence, Systems Resilience. What do all of these have in common?  More then you think.  Dr Daved van Stralen is a great voice in the world of highly reliable systems and organizations.  He has led conferences all over the world, he has written articles, he coaches people almost every friday...Why does he do it?  This episode will tell you a lot about his motivation and skills in this arena. This may very well be the perfect venue for Dave.  He is quick, smart, and pointed in how he describes what he is thinking about.  You will like this podcast much.   Listen for the expanding capacity idea.  This discussion, alone, is worth listening to this episode. Enjoy!

Safety Podcast, Velocity 2015 - New York, human performance, medical safety, high reliability. Time is important to safety.  We must learn to create time when we have events.  This episode discusses this very issue in an interesting way.   Enjoy and thanks for listening.

I can't seem to get enough of the Zero Accident discussion.  I have it in my sleep.  I am constantly stopped on the street to talk about it.  Zero is on the side of every truck that comes to fix stuff in my office.   Zero, zero, zero, zero.   Enough already! This episode talks about Zero as a part of Workplace Safety, High Reliability, Safety Culture.   We are using zero wrong and it is making our organization more quiet and less safe.   Zero is the end product, not the way we do work. See what you think?   Give this a listen.

Dr. Alan Frankfurt almost did not make this episode of the PreAccident Prevention Podcast.  Not because he had to step out to deliver a small, young life in to this crazy world - but because he is so humble about his role in understanding safety and reliability in healthcare that he did not think he had much to add to this discussion. You will soon see how wrong he was. Dr. Frankfurt is simply one of the best real-time practitioners of High Reliability I have ever spent time hanging out with.... he is fun, smart, and good at what he does. Do not miss this podcast.  Medial safety, patient safety, High Reliability in Hospitals are all topics Alan can speak with great knowledge and experience.

Try this on for size?  Can we better manage safety, operational excellence, human performance, high reliability, and our organizations by simply saying yes - and not saying no "no."   Bill Rigot, our friend the genius investigator and reformed engineer (my words - not his), tells a story from his past about the importance of service, of saying yes, and doing good work.  Give this a listen and enjoy.  It is a great safety moment.

Meet Todd Hohn a close friend and associate of many, many years.  Todd has worked in health and safety for many years and in multiple industries.  You will notice I am using the words health and safety to describe his job.  That is because this pod cast is going to spend as much time talking about health as it does talking about safety.  Emphasizing the health part of health and safety is pretty unusual in our industry (and in this pod cast - which is a problem I am working hard to remedy). Todd is the Global Manager of Health and Safety for Underwriter's Laboratory UL.  This is a fun podcast that will take you on a journey around the intersection of worker heath and worker performance.  Enjoy this episode.    Thanks for listening and taking part in the PreAccident Podcast.  It is great to have you on the team.

Here is a quick thought on how we don't control accidents (because they are accidents) but we do manage conditions that lead to consequences.  All of this happens because of a giant shift in thinking about failure.  We must learn to fail forward...fail safely. Think fall protection!  We don't manage the fall, we do manage the way the person lands.  That is the entire notion of this pod cast episode.  We fail safely.   We fail safely.  We fail safely.  If we don't fail safely, we fail safety. Thanks and tell your friends.  You make the pod cast go.

This is a repeat - command performance - of Jim's earlier pod cast on complexity and organizations.  So many people have asked to listen to this one again.  I decided to repeat the post. Enjoy!  Safety, Human Performance and High Reliability have never sounded better as a response to complex organizations. Jim Barker has some great ideas about complexity and organizations.  Dr. Barker is on the leadership faculty at Dalhousie University and spends his time thinking about how organizations function in complex operational environments.  This conversation will both change your thinking and prepare you with ways to move further in understanding and managing workers in complex operations.  This conversation is the beginning of what I hope is many more conversations about "the motion of complexity."  Listen carefully to Jim's comments about workers knowing what to do now - and how the now is not the past or the future.  This is a great podcast.

Jim has worked for nearly 30 years in the Australian and Global minerals industry.  He was involved in early developments of mining risk management and from 1998 he was Professor and Director of the Minerals Industry Safety and Health Center at the University of Queensland.  Since September 2013, Jim has been self-employed, working for several clients including the International Council on Mining and Metals in the development of the new guide on Critical Control Management. I saw Jim present after me in Australia and knew I had to get this presentation for our pod cast.  I really am interested in the way Jim (and the industry) has taken a strong look at the connectivity between Critical Tasks and Critical Controls. Special thanks to the CME 2015 Safety & Health Conference for this little tidbit.  Enjoy and learn mucho!  Thanks for being a part of the New View of Safety, High Reliability, and Risk.  You make this pod cast a success.  

This quick safety moment is a small introduction to Nassim Taleb's book, "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder."  I won't review the book, or even try to discuss the book, but I will introduce a word to talk about failure in a different way.  Our systems should get stronger when these systems fail.  That is an important idea, one that demands discussion and thought. Here is a reference on the book:  Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and The Bed of Procrustes. Thanks for being a part of our podcast.  Without you this would be mighty lonely.

Welcome back Martha Acosta - by popular demand.  So many of us have asked to hear more from Martha and I was pleased to ask her to come back and talk to us some more.  She has much to say...and all of it seems to be extremely helpful to those of us who are on the "edge of the New View" for workplace safety and higher reliability. Martha discusses the difference between fear and anxiety - but she has this conversation around the idea that leaders try to control things they really cannot control - and don't control the things that they really must control.  It is a great podcast episode. Thanks for the listen and for  being a part of this community.  Safety Culture is a scary term, because we often use it as a rather fancy way to blame people and not look at processes.  Pay close attention to what Martha has to say...I promise you will learn a lot of new things.