It is hard to change almost a lifetime of your organization’s thinking about safety in the traditional way and it is really difficult to change your organization’s history of bureaucracy that continues to reinforce the traditional safety definitions and metrics our organizations have used for many years. Let’s face it, change even for the better is hard to do. Doing Safety Differently is a discussion between two friends on what they have learned by watching organizations around the world change the way they do work.

The safety profession has been stagnant for far too long. Safety folks are abused and misused; they’re often underpaid and overworked; they are undervalued and not appreciated; they find themselves being blamed and shamed when accidents occur; they are torn between the front line and management, they have been forced to knowingly promote flawed, ineffective and disproven safety management systems - to preach from a bible in which they do not believe, and its time for all of that to change.

A man finds himself on the top step of a stepladder; a woman removes the guard to her machine; a worker is not wearing her safety glasses in the plant. Why do these folks do these things? One tendency is to blame workers for safety errors and label their personal failings as the cause. Labeling does not solve the problems. These tendencies build dysfunctional management practices that create fear associated with your safety programs. I want to teach you a better way to analyze behaviors to understand why your employees were put in a position to take the risk in the first place.

Time-pressed professionals looking for practical guidance to shape their current or future safety programs should use this book. Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety helps to identify complex potential incidents before they take place. Based around the New View of human error, it offers established human performance theory in a highly practical context.

Conklin’s audiobook is an interesting and informal discussion with the listener about the five principles of human performance; principle by principle, section by section. These five theories about how humans perform in organizations are principles, the building blocks of human performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds...and changing the way we think about work is a vital step toward improvement.