#61 - Todd Conklin - Why the Best Safety Systems Assume Failure

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 itKathleen Sutcliffe's "failure to rescue" research, and what it means for how you measure riskLife-saving "rules" vs. life-saving "controls" — and why the word choice mattersWhy "stop work" is broken, and what "start when you're ready" replaces it withHow blame — including self-blame — quietly kills organisational learningThe London bus strike, "work to rule," and why you want thinking compliance, not rote complianceIt's not about the speak. It's about the up.⏱️ Chapters00:00 Introduction — the godfather of HOP02:05 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 possible10:30 What database administrators taught Todd about systems thinking15:11 Chaos monkeys — and the engineer who beta-tests by sitting on his keyboard21:31 Why aren't they called eight life-saving controls?22:44 Kathleen Sutcliffe and "failure to rescue"27:13 Why "stop work" doesn't work28:23 Start when you're ready, not stop before you fail31:02 How blame stops organisations from learning36:53 A well-designed system is invisible39:34 The London bus strike: what "work to rule" tells us about real work45:19 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.comSafety Heroes is the Health, Safety & Environment podcast by Pixaera. New episodes every other week.Send us a message! If you like this podcast episode, subscribe here and follow us on LinkedIn for the latest from our HSE community and guests. Connect with our CEO and host, Mousa, today to stay updated on Safety Heroes, Pixaera, and more. Do you want to be a guest on Safety Heroes, or know someone who would be a great fit? We’d love to hear from you. Send us a message on LinkedIn or email [email protected].