PreAccident Investigation Podcast

Today's podcast is a discussion with a Senior Flight Attendant Instructor about safety, performance, and reliability at the worker level.  Discussions with people who must ensure safety in the very midst of the traveling public are interesting and informative. Chris Basore talks about training for events that hopefully will never, ever happen - but if they do, everybody must perform exactly to expectation.  The challenge is to ensure that very outcome happens.  High consequence, low probability event preparation is time consuming, difficult, and important...and we all can learn from the commercial aviation industry.  Enjoy this podcast, it is interesting.

This safety moment presents a question and I am not sure there is an answer.  It seems like that would be no good for anybody, but this safety moment asks "if planning is sufficient enough to create safe and reliable work?"  This thought provoking discussion should be a great starting point for you to lead your very own discussion about plans, procedures, and prevention.  

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.

The problem with being wrong is that before you know you are wrong, you think you are right.  This quick safety moment is an introduction to the idea of how important having a "questioning attitude" is to the normal and reliable operational systems that you count on as a manager.  In short, if nothing is going on - you should not feel safer - you ought to be asking what could happen next.

Tom Krause has the best discussion about BBS, his world, his history, and what he is thinking about now.  This discussion is a great way to understand how all of our safety approaches have helped moved the thinking about safe and reliable systems towards new thinking.  Without the old - we could not have the new...and why that is refreshing and important.

Safety Moment:  Asking workers to not get hurt is not very effective.  Asking workers to be prepared for a potential event and building in safeguards and defenses is crazily effective.  Which one of these choices have you traditionally done?  Which one do you think is more effective?  Give this a listen.

There were some request to do some small safety or operational excellence moments for leaders.  This is the first in that great experiment.  This safety moment is a discussion for leaders about the determining is an event is a safety failure or a safeguard success.  The funny thing is...that difference is a decision that a manager is forced to make immediately and often with very little information.  Which decision the managers makes - makes a huge difference to how the organization responds.

Kurt Kruger is a global safety manager - no, check that a global safety force - and he discusses the power of changing how an entire organization thinks about safety.  Kurt's talk discusses learning from success and learning from failures in order to help managers at all levels change the way they manage safety.

Meet Steve Newell and Dee Woodhull in a discussion about safety and the new view.  Steve and Dee are some of the founders of an organization called ORCHSE.  This discussion talks about history, the present, and the future of better understanding fatalities and serious events.  This discussion is an entertaining and interesting look at how organizations are thinking about leading safety and reliability.

Jim Kleinsteuber is an expert on a problem we all have in our organizations: slips, trips, and falls.  This conversation is with one of the leading instructors on a slip, trip, and fall simulator and he is well versed in why this safety learning tool makes so much sense in our workplaces.  Before you rush to judgement, give this a listen - this episode just might be the introduction a whole new approach to slips, trips, and falls.