Safety

Differently
Highly Reliable
Organizations
Todd Conklin PhD
Human Performance Improvement/ HRO
Toddconklin@gmail.com
Never
take a sleeping pill
And a laxative
at the same time.
In any order…
Conklin
 The Safety Journey So Far…
Compliance
• Behaviors
Policy/Rules
Accidents
•
• Enforcement

Design
• Human Factors
• Process Safety Fatality
Human
• Standardized
Systems Performance
Serious Event
• Not like
New View
others
• Not near
NO Individual
misses
Organizational
Exist in success
Time
•
• issues Identified
Understand work
Conklin
 Traditional New
Safety View Safety View
1. Workers are the problem to 1. Workers are not the
be fixed. We fix safety by problem – They are the
making workers better. problem solvers.
2. We must tell workers what 2. We don’t tell our
to do and, perhaps more organizations what to do
importantly, not to do. – ask them what they
3. Safety is the absence of need.
accidents. 3. Safety is not the absence
of accidents – it is the
presence of capacity.

Conklin
Safety is not the
absence of
Accidents.
Safety is the
presence of
Defenses.
Capacity.
Conklin
 Workers are as safe as
they need to be,

Without being too safe,

in order to be

productive.
Conklin
Until They’re NOT..
 “ To understand
failure…we must first
understand our reaction
to failure.”

*
— Sidney Dekker

Conklin
 Sharp End
Workers
Highest
Highest
Influence Front-line
Injury
Over Supervisors
Potential
System Managers
Leaders
Company
Customers
Regulators
Blunt End
Conklin
3
Pre-Accident Investigations, Conklin 2013

Parts of an Event
Conklin
Worker’s Don’t Cause
Failures.

Worker’s Trigger Latent

Conditions That Lie Dormant
In Organizations
Waiting for This Specific
Moment In Time.
Conklin
Shift your thinking from
“Who Failed”
to
“What Failed”
Conklin
Workers
Are Masters of
Complex Adaptive
Behavior…
Conklin
 The Gray Area:
Uncertain
interpretation
Clearly Safe of Safe work Clearly Not Safe
to do Work to do Work

*
Conklin
Clearly Safe Clearly Not Safe
Event
to do Work to do Work

17

*
Conklin
 Start
Of Work Execution
Improvement
Job Area
Actual Operational
Safety: Safety
In Practice

Hazard

Safety Understood:
Drift and Accumulation
Conklin
Is the juice
worth the
squeeze?
Conklin
Workers fail… when
we make it easy to do
work incorrectly and
hard to do work
Reliably.
Conklin
The Power of
Early
Problem Capacity
ID
Identified
or Discovered
Problem

Conklin
The Hazard of Capacity

Late
Problem
ID

Conklin
Safety is not the
absence of
Accidents.
Safety is the
presence of
Capacity.
Conklin
 Listen to…

PreAccident
Podcast
Todd Conklin